Watts v. Burkhart’s Empirical Analysis
978 F.3d 269 · 1992
Citation profile
25 federal appellate · 5 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 60 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably United States v. Jenkins (1993), Ramirez v. Oklahoma Department of Mental Health (1994)
25 federal appellate · 5 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
Relies on Celotex Corporation v. Catrett H · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Scheuer v. Rhodes · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Anderson v. Creighton
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 60 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It would seem to follow, therefore, that state officials subject to restraints comparable to those imposed by the APA and performing adjudicatory functions in resolving potentially heated controversies are entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability for their judicial acts.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“'absolutely immune from liability for [their] judicial acts even if [their] exercise of authority is flawed by the commission of grave procedural errors.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Because the legal remedies already available to the defendant in [an agency enforcement] proceeding provide sufficient checks on agency zeal, we hold that those [agency] officials [who perform certain functions analogous to those of a prosecutor and] who are responsible for the decision to initiate or continue a proceeding subject to agency adjudication are entitled to absolute immunity from damages liability for their parts in that decision.”
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.