Torchinsky v. Siwinski’s Empirical Analysis
942 F.2d 257 · 1991
Citation profile
57 federal appellate · 16 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 148 later decisions — most recently January 2024 · most notably Shaw v. Stroud (1994), Sharrar v. Felsing (1997)
57 federal appellate · 16 district · 6 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))
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Malley v. Briggs · Carnegie-Mellon University v. Cohill
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 148 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he assessment whether a “reasonable person” in the official’s position would have known that his conduct would violate “clearly established” rights must be made on the basis of information actually possessed at the time by the official, or then readily available to him, and in light of the exigencies of time and circumstance in which the official took the action challenged. The tolerance thus accorded by the objective test to “good faith” mistakes of judgment traceable to unsettled law, or faulty information, or contextual exigencies, is deliberately designed to give protection “to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law” in order to avoid undue inhibition of public officials in the discharge of their discretionary duties.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““When a police officer protects a suspect’s .rights by obtaining a warrant from a neutral magistrate, the officer should, in turn, receive some protection from suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 . Otherwise, the threat of liability would force officers to continuously second-guess the considered decisions of magistrates.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Sims v. Labowitz · Sims v. Labowitz
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.