Coughlin v. Lee’s Empirical Analysis
946 F.2d 1152 · 1991
Citation profile
48 federal appellate · 4 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 112 later decisions — most recently September 2024 · most notably Click v. Copeland (1992), Teague v. City of Flower Mound (1999)
48 federal appellate · 4 district · 3 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 Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Elrod v. Burns · Kerr v. United States Dist. Court for Northern Dist. of Cal.
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 112 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Doyle mandates that the employee must demonstrate that his protected conduct was a substantial motivating factor in his discharge. The employer then has the burden of showing a legitimate reason for which it would have discharged the employee even in the absence of his protected conduct. The employee can refute that showing by evidence that his employer’s ostensible explanation for the discharge is merely pretextual.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“interests of the [employee], as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern, and the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“'[a] public employee's claim that he has been discharged for his political affiliation in violation of his right to freely associate is not subject to the threshold public concern requirement.'”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.