Guercio v. Brody’s Empirical Analysis
911 F.2d 1179 · 1990
Citation profile
31 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably McGreevy v. Stroup (2005), Brewster v. Board of Education of the Lynwood Unified School District (1998)
31 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 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 28 U.S.C. § 1295 · 28 U.S.C. § 1346 (Federal Tort Claims Act) · 28 U.S.C. § 152 · 28 U.S.C. § 157 · 28 U.S.C. § 332
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Anderson v. Creighton · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle
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 62 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[In Pickering,] the Supreme Court instructed that a public employee’s interest in [association] on matters of public concern is protected by the first amendment only insofar as it is of greater weight than the employer’s interest in ‘promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.’ 391 U.S. at 568 [, 88 S.Ct. 1731 ]. Under this familiar rule of balance, the employee’s rights to free [association] are qualified by the countervailing interests of his employer. When a Pickering claim is adjudicated on its merits, it is for the fact-finder, be it jury or court, to determine the relative weight of these potentially antithetical interests. In the qualified immunity context, by contrast, it is the responsibility of the court to determine if the law was so clearly established at the time of the incident that a reasonably competent public official should have known that a course of action would be inconsistent with a public employee’s rights as defined in Pickering . Accordingly, having in the first instance properly defined the ‘clearly established by law' inquiry, this court must, in disposing of a qualified immunity motion, place the totality of the well-pleaded non-conclusory allegations of the complaint on the Pickering scale to balance a public employee’s interest in commenting on matters of public concern against the employer’s interest in ‘promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees,’ id. at 568 [, 88 S.C”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“must plead facts which, if true, describe a violation of a clearly established statutory or constitutional right of which a reasonable public official, under an objective standard would have known. The failure to so plead precludes a plaintiff from proceeding further, even from engaging in discovery since the plaintiff has failed to allege acts that are outside the scope of the defendant’s immunity.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[O]ur cases establish that the right the official is alleged to have violated must have been 'clearly established' in a more particularized, and hence more relevant, sense: The contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.”
2 later decisions 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.