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0 pointsopo1y ago0 comments

>...The way that the modern Supreme Court (starting with its extremely conservative turn around 2005 with the replacement of O'Connor with Alito) has treated Qualified Immunity is that the constitutional violation (in this case, the violation of her 4th Amendment rights) needs to have been clearly found in previous cases in this particular circuit (or by the Supreme Court itself).

The modern over-expansion of QI actually started in 1982:

>The modern test for qualified immunity was established in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982).

Since then, while several justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Sotomayor ) have sometimes dissented and criticized the over expansion of QI, the overall court doesn't seem to want to touch it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega...

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mandevil1y ago

It's a series of cases, from 1967's Pierson v. Ray, through Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) to Pearson v. Callahan (2009) that made QI so insidious. (Each of those cases was 8-1 or 9-0, incidentally. The Supreme Court gets the respect it deserves.) The current status quo where QI protects against any consequences to police brutality or monetary damages to violations of civil rights is largely a result of Pearson v. Callahan, which is what I was referring to.

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