Albright v. Oliver’s Empirical Analysis
975 F.2d 343 · 1992
Citation profile
37 federal appellate · 3 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 88 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2019 · most notably Albright v. Oliver (1994), Manuel v. City of Joliet (2017)
37 federal appellate · 3 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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Paul v. Davis · United States v. Salerno · Wilson v. Garcia · Addington v. Texas · Hudson v. McMillian
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 88 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“embarrassing diversity of judicial opinion”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Detective Oliver made no effort to corroborate Veda Moore's unsubstantiated accusation. A heap of baking soda was no corroboration. Her initial misidentification of the seller cast grave doubt on the accuracy of her information. And this was part of a pattern: of fifty persons she reported to Oliver as trafficking in drugs, none was successfully prosecuted for any crime. In the case of `Albright,' Oliver should have suspected that Moore had bought cocaine either from she knew not whom or from someone she was afraid to snitch on (remember that she had gone to work for Oliver in the first place because she was being threatened by a man to whom she owed money for previous purchases of cocaine), that she had consumed it and replaced it with baking soda, and that she had then picked a name from the phone book at random. The fact that she used her informant's reward to buy cocaine makes this hypothesis all the more plausible. An arrest is a serious business. To arrest a person on the scanty grounds that are alleged to be all that Oliver had to go on is shocking.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Albright v. Oliver“The element of confinement was further attenuated here by the fact that Albright could leave Illinois if he obtained leave of court. As he did not feel sufficiently restive ..., to request that leave, we do not think he was ‘confined’ to the point of being deprived of constitutional liberty. If you close a person in the room but the person has a key (and knows it), you have not committed false imprisonment. A fortiori you have not deprived him of his constitutional liberty. The analogy is not exact, but suppose you told a person that you had locked the door but would open it as soon as he wanted to leave, provided he asked for it politely — and he never asked, or made any motion to leave. Would that be false imprisonment? Who knows? But it would not be a sufficient deprivation of liberty to actuate constitutional remedies.”
1 later decision 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.