Fee v. Herndon’s Empirical Analysis
900 F.2d 804 · 1990
Citation profile
30 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 89 later decisions — most recently August 2023 · most notably Doe v. Taylor Independent School District (1994), Jones v. Ml Greninger (1999)
30 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1988
Relies on Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Carnegie-Mellon University v. Cohill · City of St. Louis v. Praprotnik · Ingraham v. Wright · Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 89 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“corporal punishment in public schools is a deprivation of substantive due process when it is arbitrary, capricious, or wholly unrelated to the legitimate state goal of maintaining an atmosphere conducive to learning.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Our precedents dictate that injuries sustained incidentally to corporal punishment ... do not implicate the due process clause if the forum state affords adequate post-punishment civil or criminal remedies for the student to vindicate legal transgressions.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“A sixth grade special-education student became disruptive during classroom instruction, prompting the use of corporal punishment by the school’s principal to restore discipline. The parents ... maintain that the principal beat their emotionally disturbed child so excessively, however, that the student was forced to remain in psychiatric rehabilitation for months.... The plaintiffs commenced this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988 against the school district and various educators, averring that the fourteenth amendment’s substantive due process guarantee operates to ban excessive corporal punishment in public schools. Pendent state-law tort claims were attached to this civil rights suit.... Indisputably, however, state remedies-both criminal and civil-are available in Texas and proscribe the excessive use of corporal punishment against students, including emotionally handicapped children. That being so, our precedents instruct that the substantive component of the due process clause, though selectively applied in other contexts, is inoperative under the facts herein presented. We adhere to this circuit’s rule that no arbitrary state action exists, by definition, where states affirmatively impose reasonable limitations upon corporal punishment and provide adequate criminal and civil remedies for departures from such laws. Accordingly, we conclude that defendants here, all of whom allegedly acted in contravention of Texas’s criminal or civil laws, have not implicated federal su”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.