Abolish Qualified Immunity

For John, BLUF:  This coddling of Government Lawyers has gone on too long.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Supreme Court Will Soon Decide Whether To Reconsider Qualified Immunity

From The CATO Institute, by Mr Jay Schweikert, 28 April 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

For the last several years, Cato has been leading the campaign to abolish qualified immunity -- an atextual, ahistorical judicial doctrine that shields state officials from liability, even when they violate people's constitutional rights.  The most immediate practical goal of this campaign has been to convince the Supreme Court to hear one of the many cases calling for qualified immunity to be either narrowed or reconsidered outright.  And over the last seven months, I've written several times about how the Court has indicated that it's preparing to consider several qualified immunity cases, given the manner in which it has repeatedly rescheduled several cert petitions that have been fully briefed and ready for resolution since October of last year.  My hypothesis at the time was that the Supreme Court was delaying resolution of these petitions so that it could consider them along with several other high-profile cases that also raised the same underlying question of whether qualified immunity should be reconsidered.

Now it would seem that prediction has been vindicated.  Just today, the Supreme Court distributed thirteen* different qualified immunity cert petitions for its conference of May 15, 2020.  This is obviously no coincidence, and it means that by the morning of Monday, May 18th, we will finally know whether the Justices are prepared to confront one of the most pernicious and legally baseless doctrines in the history of the Court.

Law Professor Glenn Reynolds says:  "It should abolish it.  It’s a judge-created doctrine with zero basis in the Constitution."

I am with the Law Professor.  Government Lawyers should not have immunity for their mistakes or their crimes.  Overturning this rule could be a step toward policing the kind of shenanigans that went on and are going on as part of Russiagate, and also in other disreputable activities.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff