The Empirical Truth About Qualified Immunity

Joanna C. Schwartz, How Qualified Immunity Fails, 127 Yale L.J. 2 (2017). Howard M. Wasserman The critical scholarly narrative surrounding civil rights litigation is that the Supreme Court in the past decade has expanded the defense of qualified immunity, particularly through a series of per curiam reversals of qualified-immunity denials, with the Justices impatiently demanding that lower courts properly (and expansively) approach immunity. The effect has been to slam the courthouse doors on injured plaintiffs. Expansive qualified immunity insulates all but the “plainly incompetent” and those who knowingly violate the law. It shields officers against liability except for the rare case in which the officer violated a constitutional right that was “clearly established” by binding precedent finding a constitutional violation on factually similar conduct in factually similar circumstances, or the rarer case in which the violation was so obvious in light…

Read more detail on Recent Corporate Law Department posts –

This entry was posted in Corporate Law and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply