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Full-Text Articles in Law

Compensation For Constitutional Torts: Reflections On The Significance Of Fault, John C. Jeffries Jr. Oct 1989

Compensation For Constitutional Torts: Reflections On The Significance Of Fault, John C. Jeffries Jr.

Michigan Law Review

This essay is about a neglected aspect of the problem of redressing constitutional violations. Most discussions focus on incentive effects. Unconstitutional conduct can be discouraged by the "hands-on" mechanism of reform by injunction or, more commonly, through the indirection of deterrence. Deterrence issues include selection of the penalties needed to deter official misconduct; the risk that they may also inhibit legitimate government activity; the recruitment of private attorneys general to augment enforcement; and various costs of administration. These and other aspects of deterrence pervade discussions in the Supreme Court. They are also debated in a rich and sophisticated secondary literature. …


The Qualified Immunity Doctrine In The Supreme Court: Judicial Activism And The Restriction Of Constitutional Rights, David Rudovsky Jan 1989

The Qualified Immunity Doctrine In The Supreme Court: Judicial Activism And The Restriction Of Constitutional Rights, David Rudovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Section 1983 And Constitutional Torts, Charles F. Abernathy Jan 1989

Section 1983 And Constitutional Torts, Charles F. Abernathy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have long recognized that the resurrection of section 1983 converted the fourteenth amendment from a shield into a sword by providing a civil action for vindication of constitutional rights and, to the extent that damages have gradually become the authorized remedy for section 1983 violations, we have easily come to think of such actions as constitutional torts-civil damage remedies for violations of constitutionally defined rights. There is, however, a subtler and greater reality to what has transpired, for the mere procedural vehicle of constitutional enforcement has, in retrospect, changed the substance of constitutional law itself. Section 1983 has not …