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Page Number: 52.0

8 

ZIGLAR v. ABBASI 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

The  Bivens  Court  also  recognized  that  the  Court  had 
previously inferred damages remedies caused by violations 
of  certain  federal  statutes  that  themselves did  not  explic-
itly authorize damages remedies.  403 U. S., at 395–396.  At 
the  same  time,  Bivens,  Davis,  and  Carlson  treat  the 
courts’ power to derive a damages remedy from a constitu-
tional  provision  not  as  included  within  a  power  to  find  a
statute-based  damages  remedy  but  as  flowing  from  those 
statutory cases a fortiori. 

As  the  majority  opinion  points  out,  this  Court  in  more
recent  years  has  indicated  that  “expanding  the  Bivens 
remedy is now a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity.”  Ante, at 11 
(quoting Iqbal, 556 U. S., at 675; emphasis added).  Thus, 
it has held that the remedy is not available in the context 
of suits against  military officers, see Chappell  v. Wallace, 
462  U. S.  296,  298–300  (1983);  United  States  v.  Stanley, 
483  U. S.  669,  683–684  (1987);  in  the  context  of  suits 
against  privately  operated  prisons  and  their  employees, 
see Minneci v. Pollard, 565 U. S. 118, 120 (2012); Malesko, 
534  U. S.,  at  70–73;  in  the  context  of  suits  seeking  to 
vindicate  procedural,  rather  than  substantive,  constitu-
tional  protections,  see  Schweiker  v.  Chilicky,  487  U. S. 
412,  423  (1988);  and  in  the  context  of  suits  seeking  to
vindicate  two  quite  different  forms  of  important  substan-
tive  protection,  one  involving  free  speech,  see  Bush  v. 
Lucas,  462  U. S.  367,  368  (1983),  and  the  other  involving 
protection  of  land  rights,  see  Wilkie  v.  Robbins,  551  U. S. 
537,  551  (2007).    Each  of  these  cases  involved  a  context 
that differed from that of Bivens, Davis, and Carlson with 
respect  to  the  kind  of  defendant,  the  basic  nature  of  the 
right, or the kind of harm suffered.  That is to say, as we 
have  explicitly  stated,  these  cases  were  “fundamentally 
different  from  anything  recognized  in  Bivens  or  subse-
quent cases.”  Malesko, supra, at 70 (emphasis added).  In 
each of them, the plaintiffs were asking the Court to “ ‘au-
thoriz[e] a new kind of federal litigation.’ ”   Wilkie,  supra,