Walker v. Norris’s Empirical Analysis
917 F.2d 1449 · 1990
Citation profile
42 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 99 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Russo v. City of Cincinnati (1992), Redman v. County of San Diego (1991)
42 federal appellate · 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. § 1332 (Class Action Fairness Act of 2005) · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Estelle v. Gamble · Graham v. Connor · City of Canton v. Harris · Will v. Michigan Department of State Police · Lugar v. Edmondson Oil 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 99 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A defendant acts with deliberate indifference if he causes unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain on [the plaintiff] by delib erately disregarding a serious threat to [the plaintiffs] safety after actually becoming aware of that threat. A mere inadvertent or negligent failure to adequately protect [the plaintiff] does not constitute deliberate indifference.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[b]ecause the Fourth Amendment provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection against this sort of physically intrusive governmental conduct, that Amendment, not the more generalized notion of 'substantive due process,' must be the guide for analyzing these claims.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“serves as the primary source of substantive protection ... in cases ... where the deliberate use of force is challenged as excessive and unjustified.”
3 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.