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Qualified Immunity For “Private” § 1983 Defendants After Filarsky V. Delia, Andrew W. Weis

Georgia State University Law Review

In 2012, the Supreme Court addressed private party qualified immunity in the case of Filarsky v. Delia. There, the Court found that both the historical and policy bases for immunity under § 1983 supported extending qualified immunity to outside counsel retained by a municipality. The Court noted that full-time government employees can always seek qualified immunity, so not extending it to individuals employed on some other basis would create “significant line-drawing problems . . . [which could] deprive state actors of the ability to ‘reasonably anticipate when their conduct may give rise to liability . . . .’”

This …

Bottom Up Workplace Law Enforcement: An Empirical Analysis, Charlotte S. Alexander, Arthi Prasad

Faculty Publications By Year

This article presents an original analysis of newly-available data from a landmark survey of 4,387 low-wage, front-line workers in the three largest U.S. cities. We analyze data on worker claims, retaliation, and legal knowledge to investigate what we call “bottom up” workplace law enforcement, or the reliance of many labor and employment laws on workers themselves to enforce their rights. We conclude that bottom up workplace law enforcement may fail to protect the workers who are most vulnerable to workplace rights violations, as they often lack the legal knowledge and incentives to complain that are prerequisites for enforcement activity.