No. 90-6051’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
10 federal appellate · 80 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 233 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably Carter v. City of Philadelphia (1999), Acierno v. Cloutier (1994)
10 federal appellate · 80 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
Relies on Conley v. Gibson · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Anderson v. Creighton · Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp.
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 233 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A significant factor in our decision to deny [the prosecutor] absolute immunity in connection with the retention and management of the seized property is that, as in Burns, the judicial process will not serve as an adequate check on a prosecutor's actions in those respects. In cases such as the present one, where the seizure is not authorized from the start, the property is returned without judicial process when the government admits its mistake. When such a wrongful seizure occurs, it causes the owner to lose the value of his property so long as it remains in government hands. A grant of absolute immunity for such actions would allow the government to seize property wrongfully without accountability.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Kennedy v. Specht · Cooney v. White“[C]ourts have generally relied upon the principles developed in the case law applying section 1983 to establish the outer perimeters of a Bivens claim against federal officials.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”
2 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.