Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca6-15-03447/USCOURTS-ca6-15-03447-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 950
Nature of Suit: Constitutionality of State Statutes
Cause of Action: 

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1 

RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION 

Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b) 

File Name: 16a0013p.06 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT 

_________________ 

CITIZENS IN CHARGE, INC.; OHIOANS FOR 

WORKPLACE FREEDOM; CHRISTOPHER LITTLETON;

CINCINNATI FOR PENSION REFORM, 

Plaintiffs-Appellees, 

v. 

JON HUSTED, Ohio Secretary of State, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

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No. 15-3447 

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the Southern District of Ohio at Columbus. 

No. 2:13-cv-00935—Michael H. Watson, District Judge. 

Argued: December 10, 2015 

Decided and Filed: January 19, 2016 

Before: COLE, Chief Judge; SUTTON, Circuit Judge; BELL, District Judge.*

_________________ 

COUNSEL 

ARGUED: Ryan L. Richardson, OFFICE OF THE OHIO ATTORNEY GENERAL, 

Columbus, Ohio, for Appellant. Maurice A. Thompson, 1851 CENTER FOR 

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellees. ON BRIEF: Ryan L. Richardson, 

Tiffany L. Carwile, OFFICE OF THE OHIO ATTORNEY GENERAL, Columbus, Ohio, for 

Appellant. Maurice A. Thompson, 1851 CENTER FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, Columbus, 

Ohio, for Appellees. 

 *

The Honorable Robert Holmes Bell, United States District Judge for the Western District of Michigan, 

sitting by designation. 

>

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_________________ 

OPINION

_________________ 

 SUTTON, Circuit Judge. Ohio, like many States, has an initiative process that permits 

individuals or groups to propose new legislation and constitutional amendments. See Ohio 

Const. art. II, §§ 1a, 1b. If an initiative proposal secures enough signatures, it earns a spot on the 

next ballot, where Ohio voters may accept or reject it. Id. The catch is that state law requires all 

signature gatherers to be Ohio residents. See Ohio Rev. Code § 3503.06(C)(1)(a). Plaintiffs 

challenged the residency requirement on First (and Fourteenth) Amendment grounds, claiming 

that our court’s invalidation of a prior Ohio statute in this area required the invalidation of this 

one. See Nader v. Blackwell, 545 F.3d 459 (6th Cir. 2008). The plaintiffs sought to enjoin 

enforcement of the new law and to make the Ohio Secretary of State personally liable for several 

thousand dollars for enforcing it. The district court declared the law unconstitutional, enjoined 

enforcement of it, and denied the Secretary’s qualified-immunity defense. In this interlocutory 

appeal, the Secretary challenges the qualified-immunity ruling but not the injunction (or the 

ruling of invalidity that goes with it). Because the Ohio legislature made several changes to 

these signature-gathering requirements after Nader and because the Secretary had no clearly 

established duty to decline enforcement of this properly enacted and presumptively constitutional 

statute, we reverse. 

I. 

 The Ohio General Assembly enacted this provision in 2013. It says: “Except for a 

nominating petition for presidential electors, no person shall be entitled to circulate any petition 

unless the person is a resident of this state and is at least eighteen years of age.” Ohio Rev. Code 

§ 3503.06(C)(1)(a). Shortly after the provision took effect, counsel for three non-profit 

organizations wrote to Secretary of State Jon Husted, asking whether he planned to “reject[] 

petitions where the circulator is domiciled in a state other than Ohio[.]” R. 1-3 at 6. “While a 

court may ultimately find this law unconstitutional,” Secretary Husted responded, “that 

determination is a decision for the judicial branch, not the Secretary of State. As a result, this 

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office and county boards of election will implement this law like any other until such time as the 

legislature acts to make a statutory change or a court directs otherwise.” Id. at 8. 

 At that point, one of the non-profit groups hired a firm to help gather signatures for an 

initiative petition, paying a higher-than-usual fee to ensure that the firm hired in-state signature 

gatherers. Then all three non-profit organizations, along with one of their members, sued 

Secretary Husted in federal court. They sought a declaration that the petition-circulator 

residency requirement was unconstitutional, an injunction prohibiting its enforcement, and 

damages against Husted “as compensation for extra petition circulation charges.” R. 1 at 15. 

The Attorney General intervened to defend the law’s constitutionality on behalf of the State, and 

Husted argued that qualified immunity protected him from the plaintiffs’ damages claim. The 

district court saw things differently. It granted the plaintiffs a permanent injunction and denied 

Husted’s qualified-immunity motion. On appeal, Husted challenges the qualified-immunity 

ruling but not the injunction. 

II. 

 The qualified-immunity standard is a familiar one. The doctrine “shield[s]” public 

officials from money-damages liability if “their conduct does not violate clearly established 

statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. 

Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). The standard balances competing considerations: At one 

end, damages actions may be “the only realistic avenue for vindication of constitutional 

guarantees”; at the other end, damages actions “frequently run against the innocent as well as the 

guilty—at a cost not only to the defendant officials, but to society as a whole.” Id. at 814. 

Public officials thus are eligible for qualified immunity if (1) they did not violate any 

constitutional guarantees or (2) the guarantee, even if violated, was not “clearly established” at 

the time of the alleged misconduct. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 232, 236 (2009). Both 

inquiries are “objective,” as they turn on what the law is today and whether it was clearly 

established at the time of the challenged action. Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818–19. 

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A. 

Constitutional violation? At this stage in the case, neither the Attorney General nor the 

Secretary claims that the residency requirement satisfies the First Amendment. They instead 

maintain that the Secretary never enforced the statute in a way that caused the plaintiffs any 

damages. In response to an inquiry from the plaintiffs, Secretary Husted said that he would 

enforce the statute until directed by a court to do otherwise. Because the plaintiffs thereafter 

obtained an injunction against enforcement of the statute, it is difficult to understand how they 

can blame the Secretary for any costs incurred by hiring in-state signature gatherers. If anything, 

Husted’s letter told the plaintiffs how to avoid incurring the costs of compliance with the statute: 

file a lawsuit to enjoin its enforcement. That would have worked just fine, as later events 

confirmed. In response to the lawsuit, the district court declared the statute invalid, the court 

enjoined enforcement of the statute, and the Secretary opted not to appeal that part of the court’s 

decision. 

 The plaintiffs nonetheless chose to incur costs based on hiring resident petition 

circulators before filing the lawsuit. They of course are free to presume the constitutionality of a 

statute (many people do) and incur costs based on that assumption. What is not clear is whether 

that means the Secretary of State caused them to suffer damages by violating their constitutional 

rights in this setting. Be that as it may, we need not resolve the case on this ground—a ground 

that was not fully engaged by the parties below and thus not addressed by the district court. Any 

such rights, as it turns out, were not clearly established at the time Secretary Husted wrote his 

letter to the plaintiffs. 

B. 

Clearly established right? At the time Husted acted, no court had declared this residency 

requirement unconstitutional and he acted reasonably in saying he would enforce it. When 

public officials implement validly enacted state laws that no court has invalidated, their conduct 

typically satisfies the core inquiry—the “objective reasonableness of an official’s conduct”—that 

the immunity doctrine was designed to test. Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818. State legislators swear to 

uphold the state and federal constitutions, see U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 3; Ohio Const. art. XV, § 7, 

and a presumption of constitutionality accompanies their enactments, see Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 

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312, 320 (1993)—a presumption on which executive officials generally may depend in enforcing 

the legislature’s handiwork. State law encourages such reliance, with the Ohio Supreme Court 

noting with a touch of overstatement (more on that later) that “[t]he secretary of state is not 

vested with any jurisdiction to determine judicial questions dealing with the constitutionality of 

any law.” Maloney v. Rhodes, 345 N.E.2d 407, 410 (Ohio 1976) (quotation omitted). Because 

Secretary Husted acted in the face of legislative action (a duly enacted, presumptively 

constitutional law) and judicial inaction (the absence of an on-point decision making the law 

unconstitutional), he did not violate clearly established law or otherwise act unreasonably. 

 Caselaw validates this conclusion. The Supreme Court tells us that public officials 

should generally receive qualified immunity when enforcing properly enacted laws. See 

Michigan v. DeFillippo, 443 U.S. 31 (1979). In DeFillippo, the Court addressed what came to 

be known as the Fourth Amendment’s good-faith exception, which requires the same “objective 

reasonableness” showing that the qualified-immunity inquiry demands. See Groh v. Ramirez, 

540 U.S. 551, 565 n.8 (2004); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 911–12 (1984). The Court 

noted that “[t]he enactment of a law forecloses speculation by enforcement officers concerning 

its constitutionality—with the possible exception of a law so grossly and fragrantly 

unconstitutional that any person of reasonable prudence would be bound to see its flaws.” 

DeFillippo, 443 U.S. at 38. The Court was more explicit in Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547 (1967). 

“A policeman’s lot is not so unhappy,” it reasoned, “that he must choose between being charged 

with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he has probable cause, and being mulcted in 

damages if he does.” Id. at 555. 

The Court’s deeds have matched its words. So far as the parties’ research has revealed 

and so far as our own research has uncovered, the Supreme Court has never denied qualified 

immunity to a public official who enforced a properly enacted statute that no court had 

invalidated. This indeed would seem to be the paradigmatic way of showing objectively 

reasonable conduct by a public official. 

 Our court has adopted similar reasoning in granting qualified immunity to public officials 

who enforced validly enacted laws. See Risbridger v. Connelly, 275 F.3d 565, 573–74 (6th Cir. 

2002); Hanna v. Drobnick, 514 F.2d 393, 397 (6th Cir. 1975), repudiated on other grounds by 

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Thomas v. Shipka, 818 F.2d 496 (6th Cir. 1987); cf. Wolfel v. Morris, 972 F.2d 712, 719–20 (6th 

Cir. 1992). Other circuits have done the same, treating the fact that an officer enforced a 

presumptively constitutional law as creating “a heavy presumption in favor of qualified 

immunity.” Connecticut ex rel. Blumenthal v. Crotty, 346 F.3d 84, 104 (2d Cir. 2003); see 

Swanson v. Powers, 937 F.2d 965, 968–69 (4th Cir. 1991); Doe v. Heck, 327 F.3d 492, 516, 525, 

527 (7th Cir. 2003); Grossman v. City of Portland, 33 F.3d 1200, 1210 (9th Cir. 1994); Cooper 

v. Dillon, 403 F.3d 1208, 1220 (11th Cir. 2005); cf. Lederman v. United States, 291 F.3d 36, 47 

(D.C. Cir. 2002). 

 Any other approach would place risky pressures on public officials to second-guess 

legislative decisions. When faced with a statute of questionable validity, executive actors would 

find themselves forced to choose between applying the law (and subjecting themselves to 

monetary liability) or declining to do so (and subjecting themselves to a mandamus lawsuit). 

When personal liability is added to the mix, one could well imagine the balance tipping toward 

non-enforcement in close cases, all the while sacrificing the legislature’s considered judgments 

about a statute’s constitutionality. That is not a recipe for good government or for encouraging 

public officials to act independently. 

 None of this should be taken to mean that state officials must enforce duly enacted 

statutes. Just like state legislators and judges, state executive-branch officials swear their own

“Oath or Affirmation[] to support th[e] [federal] Constitution,” U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 3; see 4 

U.S.C. § 101, and their state constitution, see Ohio Const. art. XV, § 7. The Supremacy Clause 

“invalidates state laws that interfere with, or are contrary to, federal law.” Hillsborough County 

v. Automated Med. Labs., Inc., 471 U.S. 707, 712 (1985) (quotation omitted); see U.S. Const. art 

VI, cl. 2. Executive officials have an “independent obligation[] to interpret and uphold the 

Constitution,” Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 798 (2008), and they may conclude in good 

faith that a particular statute is unenforceable. In that sense, the Ohio Supreme Court 

overreached when it said that “the question of [a law’s] constitutionality . . . is of a judicial 

character, not executive,” and that the Secretary of State lacks “jurisdiction to determine judicial 

questions dealing with the constitutionality of any law.” Maloney, 345 N.E.2d at 410. Maloney 

involved the duty under the Ohio Constitution of the Secretary of State to file duly enacted 

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legislation. Id. That ruling of course does not insulate the Secretary of State from his duty under 

the United States Constitution to obey federal law. That is just what Secretary Husted’s 

predecessor, Jennifer Brunner, did when she declined to enforce an earlier version of today’s 

statute based on her interpretation of federal law. What Secretary Brunner may do, however, 

does not prove what Secretary Husted must do. 

 The enforcement of a presumptively valid law, it is also true, does not automatically 

entitle officials to qualified immunity. Some laws may be “so grossly and flagrantly 

unconstitutional” that any reasonable officer would decline to enforce them. DeFillippo, 443 

U.S. at 38. This exception means that, contrary to plaintiffs’ concerns, the Secretary would not 

receive qualified immunity for enforcing an “involuntary servitude” law or one that required 

“separate but equal racial accommodations,” even if such laws somehow were enacted by the 

Ohio General Assembly. Appellees’ Br. 39. (As it turns out, the Ohio General Assembly’s 

record in this area is not beyond reproach. After ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867, it 

voted to undo its ratification vote in 1868, though it re-ratified the amendment in 2003. See

Gabriel J. Chin, Ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment in Ohio, 28 W. New Eng. L. Rev. 179, 

179–81 (2006).)

 Today’s election statute is not a “grossly and flagrantly unconstitutional” law. At the 

same time that the Tenth Circuit has invalidated residency requirements for initiative-petition 

circulators, see Yes on Term Limits, Inc. v. Savage, 550 F.3d 1023, 1025–27, 1031 (10th Cir. 

2008); Chandler v. City of Arvada, 292 F.3d 1236, 1238–44 (10th Cir. 2002), the Eighth Circuit 

has upheld such a requirement, see Initiative & Referendum Inst. v. Jaeger, 241 F.3d 614, 616–

17 (8th Cir. 2001). Jaeger held that North Dakota’s residency restriction advanced the State’s 

“compelling interest in preventing fraud” without “unduly restrict[ing] speech,” noting that nonresidents had “many alternative means . . . to communicate their views on initiative measures.” 

Id. Whether our court would accept the Eighth Circuit’s reasoning if presented with the same 

question matters not. What matters is that the existence of a circuit split by itself amply supports 

Husted’s position that he could reasonably conclude that Ohio’s residency requirement was 

constitutional. See Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 618 (1999). If judges can reasonably 

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disagree about the meaning of the Constitution, we should not punish public officials for 

reasonably picking one side or the other of the debate. 

 Also supporting Husted is the nature of the multi-factor, interest-balancing test used to 

evaluate residency requirements. The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned that, while “the 

circulation of a petition involves . . . ‘core political speech,’” Meyer v. Grant, 486 U.S. 414, 421–

22 (1988), “no litmus-paper test . . . separate[s] valid ballot-access provisions from invalid 

interactive speech restrictions,” Buckley v. Am. Constitutional Law Found., Inc., 525 U.S. 182, 

192 (1999) (quotation omitted); see Storer v. Brown, 415 U.S. 724, 730 (1974). The Court 

typically proceeds by distinguishing regulations that impose “severe burdens” from those that 

create “[l]esser burdens”; the former must survive strict scrutiny, while the latter “trigger less 

exacting review.” Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351, 358 (1997); see

Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428, 434 (1992). The distinction between “severe burdens” and 

“lesser” ones is often murky, see Buckley, 525 U.S. at 207 (Thomas, J., concurring in the 

judgment), and Husted could reasonably have determined (as the Eighth Circuit did, see Jaeger, 

241 F.3d at 617) that the residency requirement did not impose a “severe burden” on petition 

circulators. Even if Husted decided that strict scrutiny applied, he reasonably could have 

concluded that the regulation survived it (perhaps relying on the Eighth Circuit’s statement that 

residency requirements advance the State’s “compelling interest in preventing fraud,” id. at 616). 

Courts generally accord public officials wide latitude (for qualified-immunity purposes) when 

the constitutionality of their acts comes down to the subtleties of interest balancing and narrow 

tailoring, especially when courts have reached different conclusions on the point. See Borucki v. 

Ryan, 827 F.2d 836, 848 (1st Cir. 1987). 

 The plaintiffs respond that Nader v. Blackwell, 545 F.3d 459 (6th Cir. 2008), seals 

Husted’s fate. True enough, that decision invalidated a prior version of this statute. But it does 

not resolve today’s case. The prior statute read, “No person shall be entitled to . . . circulate any 

declaration of candidacy or any nominating, initiative, referendum, or recall petition, unless the 

person is registered as an elector and will have resided in the county and precinct where the 

person is registered for at least thirty days at the time of the next election.” Id. at 473 (Boggs, 

C.J., lead opinion) (quotation omitted). During the 2004 presidential election, the Ohio Secretary 

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of State enforced this provision to deny ballot access to third-party candidate Ralph Nader, 

because some of his petition circulators were not Ohio residents or registered voters. Id. at 465–

67. Nader sued the Secretary and, in the course of granting him qualified immunity, the three 

opinions for the court held the residency and registration requirements unconstitutional. Id. at 

473–78; id. at 478 (Moore, J., opinion for the court); id. at 478–79 (Clay, J., opinion for the 

court). This decision, say the plaintiffs, should have alerted Husted that he could not enforce the 

amended statute. 

Nader leans in plaintiffs’ direction on the constitutional issue, but it does not show that 

Husted violated clearly established law. Nader challenged the residency restriction as “applied 

to circulators working on a presidential candidate’s campaign,” Appellant’s Brief, Nader, 

545 F.3d 459 (No. 07-4350), 2008 WL 2740667, at *10, and after undertaking a “close analysis 

of the particular facts of the case,” our court invalidated the specific residency requirement at 

issue, 545 F.3d at 476–77 (Boggs, C.J., lead opinion). 

The Ohio General Assembly amended the law in response. The new law differs from the 

old law in several ways. It creates an exemption for presidential nominating petitions (such as 

the one at issue in Nader), meaning that circulators of such petitions need not meet the residency 

requirement. Ohio Rev. Code § 3503.06(C)(1)(a). And it detaches the residency restriction from 

the requirement that petition circulators be registered voters, so that circulators no longer need to 

reside in “the county and precinct” of registration but may instead reside anywhere in the State. 

Id. § 3503.06(A), (C)(1)(a). These revisions confirm the legislature’s good-faith attempt to pass 

a more narrowly tailored law than the one Nader invalidated, and Husted could reasonably credit 

that effort by deciding to enforce the new law. 

Husted could fairly believe that the State has a heightened interest in imposing a 

residency requirement on initiative petition circulators, because initiatives enact changes to state 

or local laws while presidential elections affect the entire nation. Or he could fairly believe, as 

the Seventh Circuit has suggested, that restrictions on presidential nominating petitions impose 

greater burdens on speech than restrictions on initiative petitions do. “[T]he ballot initiative 

proponent will generally seek support for the one narrow issue presented in the initiative, while 

the typical candidate embodies a broad range of political opinions, and thus those who solicit 

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signatures on their behalf must speak to a broader range of political topics.” Krislov v. Rednour, 

226 F.3d 851, 861 (7th Cir. 2000). Or he could fairly believe, as the Second Circuit has 

suggested, that the Ohio General Assembly created a “less burdensome requirement[]” when it 

expanded the in-precinct residency restriction to an in-state residency restriction. See Lerman v. 

Bd. of Elections, 232 F.3d 135, 150 & n.14 (2d Cir. 2000). In the face of these variables, Husted 

could fairly conclude that the new statute would be subject to less-than-strict scrutiny or that, 

even if strict scrutiny applied, the law was sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive it. Although 

Nader noted that “[i]nitiative-petition circulators . . . resemble candidate-petition signature 

gatherers,” see 545 F.3d at 475 (Boggs, C.J., lead opinion) (quoting Buckley, 525 U.S. at 191), it 

did not say that initiative and candidate nominating petitions are identical—or that they are 

subject to the same First Amendment analysis. If qualified immunity protects all but the “plainly 

incompetent,” Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986), it protects Husted’s reasonable 

assessment that the legislature’s more narrowly tailored statute permitted him to enforce it. 

 Caselaw from other circuits bolsters this conclusion. Connecticut ex rel. Blumenthal v. 

Crotty, 346 F.3d 84, 88–89 (2d Cir. 2003), addressed a New York law that imposed limitations 

on the lobstering permits granted to out-of-state residents. After concluding that the law violated 

Article IV’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, see id. at 93–100, the Second Circuit granted 

qualified immunity to the state officials who had enforced the statute, even though several courts 

had invalidated a comparable law relating to shellfish permits, see id. at 100–09. The court 

acknowledged that the disparities between the shellfish law and the lobstering law were 

“distinction[s] without a difference insofar as [the] Privileges and Immunities analysis is 

concerned.” Id. at 107. But these disparities nonetheless “mudd[ied] the waters for purposes of 

qualified immunity by casting doubt in the minds of reasonable officials about whether 

invalidation of the Nonresident Shellfish Law would translate into invalidation of the 

Nonresident Lobster Law.” Id.

The D.C. Circuit reached a similar conclusion when two members of the Capitol Police 

arrested a protestor who violated the Capitol Police Board’s regulations by distributing leaflets in 

a “no-demonstration zone.” Lederman, 291 F.3d at 39–40. The court held that the 

demonstration ban violated the First Amendment, see id. at 41–46, but granted qualified 

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immunity to the arresting officers, see id. at 46–48. “While we find the ban’s sheer breadth 

astonishing,” the D.C. Circuit said, “we recognize that the Police Board made some attempt at 

tailoring” by “exempt[ing] expressive tee-shirts and buttons” from the ban. Id. at 47. “Although 

those qualifiers [could not] begin to satisfy the narrow tailoring requirement, . . . their inclusion 

in the ban [kept] it from being ‘so grossly and flagrantly unconstitutional’ . . . that the officers 

should have recognized its flaws.” Id. (quoting DeFillippo, 443 U.S. at 38). Just so here, where 

the plaintiffs’ arguments about the law’s unconstitutionality may be winning ones but where the 

Secretary’s decision to enforce the law was not objectively unreasonable. 

 The plaintiffs invoke several out-of-circuit cases that struck down petition-circulator 

residency requirements. But these cases engaged in fact-intensive analyses to determine that the 

specific residency requirement at issue was unconstitutional, and most of them arose when 

circulators of candidate nominating petitions challenged the governing statute. See Lerman, 232 

F.3d at 139, 145–53; Libertarian Party v. Judd, 718 F.3d 308, 310–12, 316–19 (4th Cir. 2013); 

Krislov, 226 F.3d at 855–66; Nader v. Brewer, 531 F.3d 1028, 1031–32, 1035–38 (9th Cir. 

2008). None of these cases put Husted on notice that Ohio’s revised law was clearly invalid, 

especially when the Eighth and Tenth Circuits have issued conflicting decisions on the 

constitutionality of initiative-circulator residency requirements. Compare Jaeger, 241 F.3d at 

616–17, with Savage, 550 F.3d at 1025–27, 1031. 

 The plaintiffs worry that permitting public officials to rely on a presumption of 

constitutionality will convert qualified immunity into absolute immunity whenever an executive 

officer enforces a validly enacted law. They note that, while courts have expressed concern 

about imposing personal liability on police officers who enforce presumptively legitimate 

statutes, the same anxieties do not apply to the Secretary of State, who has the legal staff and the 

budget to assess a law’s constitutionality. But the DeFillippo inquiry does not create an absolute 

bar, and we may still hold executive officers liable for “grossly and flagrantly unconstitutional” 

conduct, see 443 U.S. at 38, as we have done before, see Leonard v. Robinson, 477 F.3d 347, 

358–59 (6th Cir. 2007). And while police-officer cases may raise some different concerns than 

the present one, we have never suggested that the qualified-immunity inquiry differs depending 

on the precise official at issue. 

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 The plaintiffs wonder why Husted did not follow the lead of his predecessor, Secretary 

Brunner, who declined to enforce the residency requirement against initiative-petition 

circulators. One possible reason is that Brunner acted after our decision in Nader but before the 

Ohio General Assembly enacted the revised statute in 2013. Nader held the residency 

requirement “unconstitutional as applied to Ralph Nader” but also noted that our decision “ha[d] 

the same practical effect as a declaration” that the relevant provisions were “facially 

unconstitutional.” 545 F.3d at 479 (Clay, J., opinion for the court) (emphasis added). Relying 

on this language, Brunner might have concluded that the statute was unconstitutional as applied 

to initiative-petition circulators, not just to presidential nominating-petition circulators. That 

conclusion was a reasonable one, and it was consistent with Brunner’s oath-driven duty “to 

support” the National Constitution. U.S. Const. art. VI, cl. 3. But when the legislature enacted a 

more narrowly tailored statute in 2013, it was just as reasonable for Husted to conclude that he 

could enforce the new law without violating his own oath. Brunner’s independent assessment of 

the law’s constitutionality no more compels Husted to follow in her footsteps than it requires one 

judge to agree with another about a tricky constitutional question. 

 The plaintiffs conclude by arguing that Ohio’s residency requirement is clearly 

unconstitutional under the Dormant Commerce Clause. But they do not point to a single case 

(nor have we found one) in which a court struck down a petition-circulator residency 

requirement under this clause. Far from being clearly established, the plaintiffs’ rights under the 

Dormant Commerce Clause have not yet been established at all. 

 For these reasons, we reverse the district court’s decision on qualified immunity, direct 

the court to grant summary judgment to Husted on the plaintiffs’ money-damages claims, and 

remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. 

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