Opinion ID: 747621
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Qualified Immunity from Suit on Federal Claims

Text: 38 The fons et origo of contemporary learning on qualified immunity is Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). Recognizing the substantial costs attendant upon litigation over the subjective good faith of government officials, id. at 816, 102 S.Ct. at 2737, the Supreme Court held in Harlow that entitlement to qualified immunity must be determined instead on a basis of objective legal reasonableness: 39 [G]overnment officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Id. at 818, 102 S.Ct. at 2738 (emphasis supplied). 40 The statutory or constitutional rights in question must have been so clearly established when the acts were committed that any officer in the defendant's position, measured objectively, would have clearly understood that he was under an affirmative duty to have refrained from such conduct. Dominque v. Telb, 831 F.2d 673, 676 (6th Cir.1987) (emphasis supplied) (citing Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987)). This 'objective reasonableness' standard focuses on whether defendants reasonably could have thought that their actions were consistent with the rights that plaintiff claims have been violated. Walton v. City of Southfield, 995 F.2d 1331, 1336 (6th Cir.1993) (emphasis supplied) (citations omitted). 41 In the case at bar the district court concluded that the plaintiffs' complaint sufficiently alleged that the defendants' acts were not in good faith, and in violation of clearly recognized constitutional rights. Memorandum Opinion at 21. As we have seen, however, an allegation of subjective lack of good faith cannot suffice to defeat qualified immunity. See also Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 1096, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986) (allegation of malice will not alone defeat an official's claim to qualified immunity). Under Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the test is an objective one: whether a hypothetical official, standing in the defendant's shoes, would necessarily have understood that taking the steps challenged by the plaintiff would violate the plaintiff's clearly established constitutional or statutory rights. 42 It is true, of course, that the right of Mr. Cullinan and Cullinan Associates to freedom of speech was clearly established, just as their rights not to be deprived of property without due process and not to be victimized by patterns of racketeering activity were clearly established. But the operation of the objective legal reasonableness standard depends substantially upon the level of generality at which the relevant 'legal rule' is to be identified. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 639, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3038-39, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987). 43 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. Plaintiffs would be able to convert the rule of qualified immunity that our cases plainly establish into a rule of virtually unqualified liability simply by alleging violation of extremely abstract rights. Id. 44 It is not determinative, in other words, that the plaintiff has asserted the violation of a broadly stated general right. Garvie v. Jackson, 845 F.2d 647, 650 (6th Cir.1988). 45 [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. Id., quoting Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. at 640, 107 S.Ct. at 3039 (citation omitted). 46 Garvie, as we had occasion to observe in Guercio v. Brody, 911 F.2d 1179, 1184 (6th Cir.1990), cert. denied, 500 U.S. 904, 111 S.Ct. 1681, 114 L.Ed.2d 76 (1991), clearly counsels the application of a fact-specific, as opposed to abstract, approach to qualified immunity questions. 47 The complaint and affidavit filed by the plaintiffs in the case at bar were commendably fact-specific. We are not persuaded that the facts need further fleshing out via expensive discovery proceedings; it seems to us that the papers already before the court present a reasonably clear picture of who the defendants are and what they are supposed to have done. 48 The district court thought the record unclear as to which defendants were acting as public officials. But the plaintiffs' papers leave no room for doubt that defendant Abramson was acting as the duly elected mayor of the City of Louisville, an office he assumed in January of 1986. Defendant Jay was acting as the city's director of finance and budget, a post he occupied from 1986 to 1992. (It is undisputed that Jay was functioning both as the finance director and as an ex officio member of the police pension fund board of trustees--and what counts, in our view, is the function; whether Jay was legally entitled to hold the offices he occupied is immaterial.) Defendant Unger was likewise acting as a city employee and ex officio member of the pension fund board, and no question has been raised as to the legality of Unger's tenure. Defendants Heavrin and Nevin also were city employees, and the complaint adds that Nevin was a retired city police officer and a beneficiary of the pension fund. Defendant GTB & M was a law partnership retained to represent the city in its litigation with the pension fund and the elected trustees, while the GTB & M lawyers actively engaged in the litigation on the city's behalf, defendants Boone, Hinkle, and Halliday, were all acting as counsel for the city. 49 There is a legal question as to whether the outside counsel status of the GTB & M lawyers and their firm makes these defendants ineligible for qualified immunity. In Duncan v. Peck, 844 F.2d 1261 (6th Cir.1988), a civil rights case brought by a shareholder against a private litigant who had secured a prejudgment attachment of the plaintiff's shares and who ultimately acquired title to the shares at a sheriff's sale, we held that private litigants are not eligible for immunity from suit under § 1983. We reached this conclusion because private parties were [not] immune from suit at common law, and because the various rationales for good faith immunity are inapplicable to private parties.... Id. at 1264. Mr. Cullinan and his firm cite Duncan for the proposition that a private individual faced with a § 1983 claim has no immunities. 50 This is an accurate proposition in most factual contexts, but not here. As the Supreme Court recently had occasion to note, it appears that the common law did provide a kind of immunity for certain private defendants, such as doctors or lawyers who performed services at the behest of the sovereign. Richardson v. McKnight, 521 U.S. 399, ----, 117 S.Ct. 2100, 2105, 138 L.Ed.2d 540 (1997) (citations omitted) (emphasis in original). As attorneys for the city, GTB & M et al. were clearly acting as the city's agents. The rationales for qualified immunity apply to these lawyers and their firm in about the same way they apply to defendant Heavrin, Louisville's sometime law director. We see no good reason to hold the city's in-house counsel eligible for qualified immunity and not the city's outside counsel. 51 Another factor that the district court may have seen as militating against an early grant of qualified immunity to the appellants in the case at bar is that a suit against [public officials] in their official capacity is actually a suit against the governmental entity, whereas [c]laims against a public official in his or her individual capacity seek to impose personal liability for actions taken under color of state law. Memorandum Opinion at 312. The court appears to have entertained doubts as to the capacity in which some or all of the appellants had been sued. 52 The plaintiffs' brief on appeal makes it clear that these [d]efendants have been sued in their individual capacities. If the complaint was ambiguous on this point, it makes no difference for present purposes; an individual is not entitled to qualified immunity against an official-capacity claim, to be sure, but neither can he be held personally liable for damages on such a claim. The viability of the plaintiffs' lawsuit against the city itself is not at issue in the present appeal. All we are concerned with here is the question whether the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity from suit for damages insofar as liability is sought to be imposed on them in their individual capacities. 53 The defendants' entitlement to qualified immunity on the federal claims turns, as we have said, on the answer to the question whether reasonable officials/lawyers standing in the defendants' shoes would necessarily have known that in attempting to oust Cullinan as an investment manager for the Louisville police pension fund, and in bringing a retaliatory lawsuit which we must assume the city could not have won had the case gone to trial, they were violating Cullinan's rights under federal law. This question may not be answered in favor of the plaintiffs, of course, unless the federal rights claimed to have been violated were clearly established in the particularized sense required under the caselaw cited above. 54 Ordinarily, at least, in determining whether a right is clearly established this court will not look beyond Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedent. Walton, 995 F.2d at 1336. The district court cited two precedents--both Supreme Court cases--in support of the proposition that the rights allegedly violated by the defendants here were clearly established. We turn to these precedents now. 55 The first decision, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., 458 U.S. 886, 102 S.Ct. 3409, 73 L.Ed.2d 1215 (1982), involved a state court judgment against a number of black citizens of Claiborne County, Mississippi, who during the 1960s had tried to enforce demands for racial equality and integration by participating in a boycott of white merchants. The Supreme Court of Mississippi had upheld the judgment insofar as it rested on a finding of liability for malicious interference with the merchants' businesses. The United States Supreme Court reversed on First Amendment grounds, noting that the black citizens had withheld their patronage from the white establishment of Claiborne County to challenge a political and economic system that had denied them the basic rights of dignity and equality that this country had fought a Civil War to secure. Id. at 918, 102 S.Ct. at 3428. 56 In the case at bar the district court relied on Claiborne Hardware to show that [a] First Amendment right to speak freely on matters of public concern is well established. Memorandum Opinion at 22. As an abstract proposition, this is obviously true. When we reach the level of generality at which we are required to focus our analysis here, however, it is far from obvious to us that reasonable people standing in the shoes of the mayor of Louisville and his associates would have read Claiborne Hardware as establishing that the First Amendment (a) forecloses efforts to replace a pension plan money manager whose investment strategies run counter to those favored by the finance director of the city whose police officers are the beneficiaries of the plan, and (b) immunizes the money manager from retaliatory litigation. 8 57 Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474, 79 S.Ct. 1400, 3 L.Ed.2d 1377 (1959), the other decision cited by the district court, involved the discharge of an aeronautical engineer by a military contractor after the Department of Defense revoked the man's security clearance without having given him an opportunity to confront his accusers. The dispositive issue in the case, as the Supreme Court saw it, is one that has no relevance here: 58 The issue, as we see it, is whether the Department of Defense has been authorized to create an industrial security clearance program under which affected persons may lose their jobs and may be restrained in following their chosen professions on the basis of fact determinations concerning their fitness for clearance made in proceedings in which they are denied the traditional procedural safeguards of confrontation and cross-examination. Id. at 493, 79 S.Ct. at 1412. 59 Citing earlier authority, the Greene Court did note that the right to hold specific private employment and to follow a chosen profession free from unreasonable governmental interference comes within the 'liberty' and 'property' concepts of the Fifth Amendment.... Id. at 492, 79 S.Ct. at 1411. It is entirely correct to say, as the district court said here, that the Supreme Court has recognized the right to be free from unreasonable actions by government officials which interfere with property interests. Memorandum Opinion at 22. But it is not correct, in our view, to conclude that Mr. Cullinan had a clearly established constitutional right not to be included as a defendant in the city's suit against the elected pension fund trustees. Neither is it correct to conclude that Messrs. Jay and Unger, the trustees who served on the pension fund board ex officio, were constitutionally barred from trying to persuade their fellow trustees to fire a money manager whose covered call option writing strategy was considered, rightly or wrongly, to be ill-advised. 60 As far as the plaintiffs' RICO claim is concerned, it would unduly prolong an opinion that may already have tested the acceptable limits of prolixity if we were to explore in depth the arguments on which that claim rests. The arguments are ingenious, but we know of no Supreme Court or Sixth Circuit precedent that could properly be said to have informed the defendants that they could not do what they stand accused of doing without violating clearly established rights conferred on the plaintiffs by the RICO statute. As far as we are concerned, this ends the matter.