Nabozny v. Podlesny’s Empirical Analysis
92 F.3d 446 · 1996
Citation profile
62 federal appellate · 9 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 159 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Peso Chavez v. The Illinois State Police (2001), DeWalt v. Carter (2000)
62 federal appellate · 9 district · 5 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. § 1291 · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. · Joshua Deshaney, a Minor, by His Guardian Ad Litem, and Melody Deshaney,s v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, et al. · Albright v. Oliver · Yick Wo v. Hopkins
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 159 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The gravamen of equal protection lies not in the fact of deprivation of a right but in the invidious classification of persons aggrieved by the state’s action. A plaintiff must demonstrate intentional or purposeful discrimination to show an equal protection violation. Discriminatory purpose, however, implies more than intent as volition or intent as awareness of consequences. It implies that a decisionmaker singled out a particular group for disparate treatment and selected his course of action at least in part for the purpose of causing its adverse effects on the identifiable group.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[i]n order to establish liability under § 1983 [for an equal protection violation], Nabozny must show that the defendants acted with a nefarious discriminatory purpose,”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“liability is not predicated upon the existence of a prior case that is directly on point.”
5 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.