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Jamison vs. McClendon: Order Granting Qualified Immunity
- js2 6y agoA court decision that opines on qualified immunity, with references to Star Wars and TikTok. A long but worthy read. Just one excerpt: > I have told this story today because of its obvious parallels with § 1983. In both situations, judges took a Reconstruction-era statute designed to protect people from the government, added in some “legalistic argle-bargle,” and turned the statute on its head to protect the government from the people. We read § 1983 against a background of robust immunity instead of the background of a robust Seventh Amendment. Then we added one judge-made barrier after another. Every hour we spend in a § 1981 case trying to parse “temporal proximity” is a distraction from the point of the statute: to determine if there was unlawful discrimination. Just as every hour we spend in a § 1983 case asking if the law was “clearly established” or “beyond debate” is one where we lose sight of why Congress enacted this law those many years ago: to hold state actors accountable for violating federally protected rights.