Opinion ID: 3018370
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Forrester has been applied to legislative

Text: immunity by every Court of Appeals to consider the issue The Caucus contends that the “functional” test laid out by the Supreme Court in Forrester should be limited to judicial immunity, as Forrester concerned a state judge’s claim of immunity after firing a probation officer. We reject this sharp limitation of Forrester. The Court’s opinion in Forrester strongly suggests that it intended the “functional” test to be applied broadly. Forrester v. White, 484 U.S. 219, 227 (1988). Every court of appeals to consider the issue has followed the Court’s suggestion and applied the Forrester test to legislative immunity. In Forrester, an Illinois state judge demoted, then discharged, a female adult probation officer. Id. at 221. The discharged officer alleged that she had been discriminated against because of her sex, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Id. The judge argued that this personnel action was protected by absolute judicial immunity. Id. The Forrester Court unanimously rejected this claim. Id. at 229-30. The Forrester Court noted that “[d]ifficulties have arisen primarily in attempting to draw the line between truly judicial 10 acts, for which immunity is appropriate, and acts that simply happen to have been done by judges,” and that “[h]ere, as in other contexts, immunity is justified and defined by the functions it protects and serves, not by the person to whom it attaches.” Id. at 227 (emphasis added) (citing many cases concerning legislators and executive officials). The Court noted that “[r]unning through our cases, with fair consistency, is a ‘functional’ approach to immunity questions other than those that have been decided by express constitutional or statutory enactment.” Id. at 224. The Court responded to the threat of “vexatious” lawsuits by former employees by pointing out that this factor in “no way serves to distinguish judges from other public officials who hire and fire subordinates.” Id. at 330-31. The Forrester Court did not perceive its decision as announcing a new test, but rather restating and clarifying a “functional” approach that it had articulated in prior cases, many of which concerned legislative immunity. Id. The Court most recently applied the functional approach to a claim of common law legislative immunity from a personnel action claim in Bogan v. Scott-Harris. 523 U.S. at 52 (“Absolute immunity for local legislators under § 1983 finds support not only in history, but also in reason.”). The Bogan Court clarified that the functional inquiry is purely objective, holding that, “[w]hether an act is legislative turns on the nature of the act, rather than on the motive or intent of the official performing it. . . . This leaves us with the question whether, stripped of all considerations of intent and motive, petitioners’ actions were legislative.” Id. at 54-55. The Court unanimously 11 held that the city officials who had eliminated plaintiff’s position by passage of a new budget had acted legislatively as “acts of voting for an ordinance were, in form, quintessentially legislative.” Id. at 55 (observing that introduction of a budget and signing into law an ordinance are “formally legislative” and “integral steps in the legislative process.”). We have applied Forrester outside the context of judicial immunity. See Schrob v. Catterson, 948 F.2d 1402, 1409 (3d Cir. 1991) (stating that the “Supreme Court has outlined a functional approach to immunity issues,” and applying Forrester to prosecutorial immunity (internal quotes omitted)). Other courts of appeals have uniformly adopted this view of Forrester and expressly applied the case to legislative immunity. See Kamplain v. Curry County Bd. of Comm’rs, 159 F.3d 1248, 1251 (10th Cir. 1998) (“In order to determine whether Defendants should be cloaked in legislative immunity, we look to the function that the Board members were performing when the actions at issue took place and we examine the nature of those actions.”); Chateaubriand v. Gaspard, 97 F.3d 1218, 1220 (9th Cir. 1996) (“To determine whether legislative immunity applies, courts look to ‘the nature of the function performed, not the identity of the actor who performed it.’”); Alexander v. Holden, 66 F.3d 62, 65 (4th Cir. 1995) (“Under Forrester v. White, the functions of the [Brunswick County] commissioners determine whether their actions are legislative or administrative for purposes of immunity.”); Hansen v. Bennett, 948 F.2d 397, 401 (7th Cir. 1991) (“We look only to the function [Mayor] Bennett was performing when he ejected Hansen. We apply this 12 functional approach even when evaluating conduct that takes place within a meeting which includes some legislative business.”); Gross v. Winter, 876 F.2d 165, 170 (D.C. Cir. 1989) (applying Forrester to a firing by a Washington, D.C. city council member). No court to have considered the issue has limited Forrester in the manner the Caucus proposes. The Caucus urges a radical limitation on the functional test that is unsupported by Supreme Court or lower court precedent. We reject this proposed narrowing of the Forrester test.