Auriemma v. Rice’s Empirical Analysis
957 F.2d 397 · 1992
Citation profile
55 federal appellate · 7 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 136 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2020 · most notably Board of the County Commissioners of Bryan County v. Brown (1997), Roe v. City of Waterbury (2008)
55 federal appellate · 7 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 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Pembaur v. City of Cincinnati · City of St. Louis v. Praprotnik · Jett v. Dallas Independent School District · Ex parte Virginia
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 136 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"On the plaintiffs’ own theory, the buck stops with Fred Rice. (The complaint alleges that Rice cleared his decisions with Harold Washington, then the mayor, but this is immaterial; the mayor is an executive, not legislative, official in Chicago's system of government.) Unless an entirely executive decision establishes municipal policy because it is final, the plaintiffs must lose. To state the issue in this way is to imply the answer. For what can it mean to say 'no vicarious liability' unless there is a distinction between creation and implementation of rules? Any city acts exclusively through agents; the city is just a name for a complex of persons. If it were enough to point to the agent whose act was the final one in a particular case, we would have vicarious liability. Action in the course of one's duty is the basis of vicarious liability. That a particular agent is the apex of a bureaucracy makes the decision ‘final’ but does not forge a link between 'finality' and 'policy'.... One may doubt the footing of Monell ... but that decision is not to be sabotaged by calling the chief bureaucrat who signs off on a particular action the city’s 'policymaker' for that action.” Id. at 399-400. " '[Responsibility for making law or setting policy' — the objective under Praprotnik of our search through local law — is authority to adopt rules for the conduct of government. Authority to make a final decision need not imply authority to establish rules. In Chicago it does not. The Supe”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“'[R]esponsibility for making law or setting policy'--the objective under Praprotnik of our search through local law--is authority to adopt rules for the conduct of government. Authority to make a final decision need not imply authority to establish rules.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[e]ven executive action in the teeth of municipal law could be called policy. . . . A practice undertaken by the executive power and suffered by the legislative power may be said to reflect a custom with the force of legislation.”
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.