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U.S. Supreme Court

Jun. 19, 2012

Lowering the bar for qualified immunity

In the decade since Hope v. Pelzer, the Supreme Court repeatedly has found qualified immunity based on the absence of a case on point. By Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Irvine School of Law

Erwin Chemerinsky

Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law

Erwin's most recent book is "Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism." He is also the author of "Closing the Courthouse," (Yale University Press 2017).


In a series of decisions over the last year, the Supreme Court has made it much more difficult for civil rights plaintiffs to recover damages for constitutional violations. The most recent example of this is the Supreme Court's decision in Reichle v. Howards, 2012 DJDAR 7318 (June 4, 2012), which held that Secret Service agents could not be held liable when they allegedly arrested a man in retaliation for his speech critical of then Vice President Dick Cheney. I...

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