Murphy v. Morgan’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
30 federal appellate · 28 district · 24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 166 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2024 · most notably Safford Unified School District 1 v. Redding (2009), Doe v. Taylor Independent School District (1994)
30 federal appellate · 28 district · 24 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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
Relies on Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Estelle v. Gamble · Mitchell v. Forsyth
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 166 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The easiest cases don’t even arise. There has never been a section 1983 case accusing welfare officials of selling foster children into slavery; it does not follow that if such a case arose, the officials would be immune from damages liability because no previous case had found liability in those circumstances. ■”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"Here, in contrast, the state removed a child from the custody of her parents; and having done so, it could no' more place her in a position of danger, deliberately and without justification, without thereby violating her rights under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment than it could deliberately and without justification place a criminal defendant in jail or prison in which his health or safety would be endangered, without violating his rights' either under the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment (held applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment) if he was a convicted prisoner.... In either case the state would be a doer of harm rather than merely an inept rescuer, just as the Roman state was a doer of harm when it threw Christians to lions.””
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The only right in question in this case is the right of a child in state custody not to be handed over by state officers to a foster parent or other custodian, private or public, whom the state knows or suspects to be a child abuser.”
7 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.