Opinion ID: 495206
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Scope of Defendants' Qualified Immunity

Text: 59 In the leading case of Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Supreme Court defined the qualified immunity standard in these terms: [G]overnment officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established ... rights of which a reasonable person would have known. 457 U.S. at 818, 102 S.Ct. at 2738. More recently, the Court noted a potential troublespot in judicial endeavors to apply the Harlow formulation: 60 The operation of [the Harlow ] standard, however, depends substantially upon the level of generality at which the relevant legal rule is to be identified. For example, the right to due process of law is quite clearly established by the Due Process Clause, and thus there is a sense in which any action that violates that Clause (no matter how unclear it may be that the particular action is a violation) violates a clearly established right. Much the same could be said of any other constitutional or statutory violation. But if the test of clearly established law were to be applied at this level of generality, it would bear no relationship to the objective legal reasonableness that is the touchstone of Harlow.... 61 [O]ur cases establish that the right the official is alleged to have violated must have been clearly established in a more particularized, and hence more relevant, sense: The contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. 62 Anderson, --- U.S. at ----, 107 S.Ct. at 3038; see also id. (in case alleging unlawful search, the relevant question is whether a reasonable officer would have believed [the] warrantless search to be lawful, in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed). A motion for summary judgment on the issue of the defendant's qualified immunity thus must be denied where, viewing the facts in the record and all reasonable inferences derived therefrom in a light most favorable to the plaintiff, a reasonable jury could conclude that the unlawfulness of defendant's action was so apparent, id., that no reasonable officer could have believed in the lawfulness of his actions. 63 Consistent with the Anderson v. Creighton Court's emphasis on the particularized manner in which the immunity inquiry is to be undertaken, we subject damage actions against government officials to a heightened pleading standard, Smith v. Nixon, 807 F.2d 197, 200 (D.C.Cir.1986), 40 wherein plaintiffs must, at the very least, 41 specify the clearly established rights they allege to have been violated with sufficient[ ] precis[ion] to put defendants on notice of the nature of the claim and enable them to prepare a response and, where appropriate, a summary judgment motion on qualified immunity grounds. Hobson v. Wilson, 737 F.2d 1, 29 (D.C.Cir.1984). With these background principles in mind, we turn to the defendants' claims of qualified immunity in these cases.