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The Supreme Court's Quiet Expansion Of Qualified Immunity, Kit Kinports
The Supreme Court's Quiet Expansion Of Qualified Immunity, Kit Kinports
Journal Articles
This Essay discusses the Supreme Court’s tendency in recent opinions to covertly expand the reach of the qualified immunity defense available to public officials in § 1983 civil rights suits. In particular, the Essay points out that the Court, often in per curiam rulings, has described qualified immunity in increasingly broad terms and has qualified and retreated from its precedents, without offering any explanation or even acknowledging that it is deviating from past practice.
In making this claim, I focus on three specific issues: the manner in which the Court characterizes the standard governing the qualified immunity defense; the question …
Comparing Supreme Court Jurisprudence In Obergefell V. Hodges And Town Of Castle Rock V. Gonzales: A Watershed Moment For Due Process Liberty, Jill C. Engle
Journal Articles
“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.” -- Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, …
Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports
Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports
Journal Articles
The Supreme Court has been whittling away at the Fourth Amendment for decades. The Court's 2014 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina allowing the police to make a traffic stop based on a reasonable mistake of law generated little controversy among the Justices and escaped largely unnoticed by the press-perhaps because yet another Supreme Court decision reading the Fourth Amendment narrowly is not especially noteworthy or because the opinion's cursory and overly simplistic analysis equating law enforcement's reasonable mistakes of fact and law minimized the significance of the Court's decision. But the temptation to dismiss Heien as just another small …