What do public school principals and teachers have in common with a police officer on the street?
At least one answer is an interest in the body of law concerning official immunity from liability in lawsuits that challenge their actions—the backdrop for a case of interest to educators that the U.S. Supreme Court heard this week.
Police officers are sometimes sued personally by criminals or suspects over alleged deprivation of constitutional rights. Educators are sued by students and their parents over a whole range of actions.
Under the high court’s precedents on what is called qualified immunity, such government officials are immune from being sued unless they violated clearly established constitutional or statutory rights of which a reasonable person would have known.
The principle has enormous practical consequences for educators and other public officials. If they are sued and can establish their immunity fairly early in the legal process, they are spared what otherwise could be lengthy and costly litigation.
The question for the justices in the case they heard Oct. 14, which stemmed from a challenged police search, is whether lower-court judges must follow a particular “order of battle” when analyzing such civil rights claims. Must they determine first whether a constitutional violation has even occurred before they decide whether an official has immunity?
2001 Case is Key
That is the order the courts are supposed to follow under a 2001 Supreme Court decision known as Saucier v. Katz. In that decision, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that if lawsuits against government officials were often decided on immunity grounds alone, the courts would never resolve many constitutional questions.
In 2007, in a case about a student’s display of a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner, one question for the justices was whether a high school principal merited qualified immunity for disciplining the student. (“Ruling in ‘Bong Hits’ Case Seen as Leaving Protection For Students’ Free Speech,” July 18, 2007.)
A lower federal court had ruled that the principal was not immune from a suit for damages because the student’s right to display the banner was so clearly established that the principal should have known she could not discipline him.
But in Morse v. Frederick, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that the principal deserved qualified immunity because it was far from clear at the time of the incident that the “Bong Hits” banner, with its drug reference, was protected student speech. In fact, the justices ruled 5-4 that it was not protected.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the Morse case could easily have been decided on qualified-immunity grounds alone if not for the requirement from the Saucier decision that the courts first ask whether a constitutional right had been violated.
“The relative ease with which we could decide this case on the qualified-immunity ground, and thereby avoid deciding a far more difficult constitutional question, underscores the need to lift the rigid ‘order of battle’ decisionmaking requirement that this court imposed upon lower courts in Saucier,” Justice Breyer said in his Morse concurrence.
Simplifying Issues?
During oral arguments last week in Pearson v. Callahan (Case No. 07-751), which raises immunity questions about police officers in Fillmore, Utah, who were sued over an alleged unconstitutional search of a home for drugs, Justice Breyer picked up the cause for overruling or scaling back the Saucier requirement. (The court itself had asked the parties in the police-search case to address the issue.)
Noting some of the complex constitutional issues that were being raised by the search, Justice Breyer said that “constitutional questions in this area are like the stars in the sky. There are so many.”
“Rather than having the judges answer each one and getting everything mixed up,” he said, “why not just have them take whatever is the easier path? As a judge, I like to take what is the easier path.”
“And if it’s easier to deal with the qualified immunity, deal with it and forget the rest of it,” Justice Breyer said to Malcom L. Stewart, the deputy U.S. solicitor general, who was arguing as a friend of the court on the side of the police officers.
Mr. Stewart agreed with Justice Breyer on the idea of doing away with the Saucier requirement.
“The mandatory order of decision for qualified-immunity cases announced in Saucier v. Katz should be overruled,” Mr. Stewart told the justices.
Justice Breyer appeared to gain the support of the Supreme Court’s newest members for his cause. Both Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., neither of whom was on the court when Saucier was decided, raised questions about that ruling’s requirement.
Chief Justice Roberts said he had had “a few of these cases” when he was on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“I thought it was very odd that I had to go and decide a difficult constitutional issue and then not worry about it, because in one sentence you say, well, but the issue is not clearly established, and so it’s qualified immunity” for the public official, the chief justice said.
But Justice Kennedy suggested that the theory behind Saucier remained valid—that the police, in this type of case, benefit from clearer constitutional guidance when the law is fully developed.
“It seems to me that we could have learned a lot if the courts of appeals had addressed” some of the constitutional issues raised by the police search in case before the court, Justice Kennedy said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the side of the suspect who sued police in the Pearson case, urged the justices to retain the Saucier requirement.
The ACLU noted that before the Saucier ruling, many suits against public officials were decided on immunity grounds without answering the fundamental constitutional questions involved. Thus, in the next case, educators or police officers could again claim that the law in a particular area was not clearly established, the group said.
A ruling in the Pearson case is expected by next June.
