Summary

• Objects (0 modified, 0 added, 1 removed)
  • Caselist.CitesClass[0]

Details

Caselist.CitesClass[0]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,60 +1,0 @@
1		-AV/Damus 1AC
2		-1AC
3		-Part 1 is Framework
4		-The starting point of government deliberation has to be the individual and how they relate to the social world around them. Rules only gain their force if they are open to public criticism. This means we need a procedural democracy that transcends the exact content of any moral rule. . Adorno:
5		-
6		-Adorno, Theodor. “Education after Auschwitz,” Critical Model
7		-
8		-Since the possibility of changing the objective—namely societal and political— conditions is extremely limited today, attempts to work against the repetition of Auschwitz are necessarily restricted to the subjective dimension. By this I also mean essentially the psychology of people who do such things. I do not believe it would help much to appeal to eternal values, at which the very people who are prone to commit such atrocities would merely shrug their shoulders. I also do not believe that enlightenment about the positive qualities possessed by persecuted minorities would be of much use. The roots must be sought in the persecutors, not in the victims who are murdered under the paltriest of pretenses. What is necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to the subject. One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again. It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection. But since according to the findings of depth psychology, all personalities, even those who commit atrocities in later life, are formed in early childhood, education seeking to prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood. I mentioned Freud’s thesis on discontent in culture. Yet the phenomenon extends even further than he understood it, above all, because the pressure of civilization he had observed has in the meantime multiplied to an unbearable degree. At the same time the explosive tendencies he first drew attention to have assumed a violence he could hardly have foreseen. The discontent in culture, however, also has its social dimension, which Freud did not overlook though he did not explore it concretely. One can speak of the claustrophobia of humanity in the administered world, of a feeling of being incarcerated in a thoroughly societalized, closely woven, netlike environment. The denser the weave, the more one wants to escape it, whereas it is precisely its close weave that prevents any escape. This intensifies the fury against civilization. The revolt against it is violent and irrational. A pattern that has been confirmed throughout the entire history of persecutions is that the fury against the weak chooses for its target especially those who are perceived as societally weak and at the same time—either rightly or wrongly—as happy. Sociologically, I would even venture to add that our society, while it integrates itself ever more, at the same time incubates tendencies toward disintegration. Lying just beneath the surface of an ordered, civilized life, these tendencies have progressed to an extreme degree. The pressure exerted by the prevailing universal upon everything particular, upon the individual people and the individual institutions, has a tendency to destroy the particular and the individual together with their power of resistance. With the loss of their identity and power of resistance, people also forfeit those qualities by virtue of which they are able to pit themselves against what at some moment might lure them again to commit atrocity. Perhaps they are hardly able to offer resistance when the established authorities once again give them the order, so long as it is in the name of some ideal in which they half or not at all believe. When I speak of education after Auschwitz, then, I mean two areas: first children’s education, especially in early childhood; then general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible, a climate, therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively conscious. Naturally, I cannot presume to sketch out the plan of such an education even in rough outline. Yet I would like at least to indicate some of its nerve centers. Often, for instance, in America, the characteristic German trust in authority has been made responsible for National Socialism and even for Auschwitz. I consider this explanation too superficial, although here, as in many other European countries authoritarian behavior and blind authority persist much more tenaciously than one would gladly admit under the conditions of a formal democracy. Rather, one must accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected with the fact that the old established authorities of the Kaiserreich decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not yet ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal to the freedom that fell into their laps. For this reason the authoritarian structures then adopted that destructive and, if I may put it so, insane dimension they did not have earlier, or at any rate had not revealed. If one considers how visits of potentates who no longer have any real political function induce outbreaks of ecstasy in entire populations, then one has good reason to suspect that the authoritarian potential even now is much stronger than one thinks. I wish, however, to emphasize especially that the recurrence or non-recurrence of fascism in its decisive aspect is not a question of psychology, but of society. I speak so much of the psychological only because the other, more essential aspects lie so far out of reach of the influence of education, if not of the intervention of individuals altogether. Very often well-meaning people, who don’t want it to happen again, invoke the concept of bonds. According to them, the fact that people no longer had any bonds is responsible for what took place. In fact, the loss of authority, one of the conditions of the sadistic-authoritarian horror, is connected with this state of affairs. To normal common sense it is plausible to appeal to bonds that check the sadistic, destructive, and ruinous impulse with an emphatic “You must not.” Nevertheless I consider it an illusion to think that the appeal to bonds—let alone the demand that everyone should again embrace social ties so that things will look up for the world and for people— would help in any serious way. One senses very quickly the untruth of bonds that are required only so that they produce a result—even if it be good—without the bonds being experienced by people as something substantial in themselves. It is surprising how swiftly even the most foolish and naive people react when it comes to detecting the weaknesses of their betters. The so-called bonds easily become either a ready badge of shared convictions—one enters into them to prove oneself a good citizen—or they produce spiteful resentment, psychologically the opposite of the purpose for which they were drummed up. They amount to heteronomy, a dependence on rules, on norms that cannot be justified by the individual’s own reason. What psychology calls the superego, the conscience, is replaced in the name of bonds by external, unbinding, and interchangeable authorities, as one could observe quite clearly in Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich. Yet the very willingness to connive with power and to submit outwardly to what is stronger, under the guise of a norm, is the attitude of the tormentors that should not arise again. It is for this reason that the advocacy of bonds is so fatal. People who adopt them more or less voluntarily are placed under a kind of permanent compulsion to obey orders. The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating. I once had a very shocking experience: while on a cruise on Lake Constance I was reading a Baden newspaper, which carried a story about Sartre’s play Morts sans s ´epulchre, a play that depicts the most terrifying things.3 Apparently the play made the critic uneasy. But he did not explain this discontent as being caused by the horror of the subject matter, which is the horror of our world. Instead he twisted it so that, in comparison with a position like that of Sartre, who engages himself with the horror, we could maintain—almost maintain, I should say—an appreciation of the higher things: so that we could not acknowledge the senselessness of the horror. To the point: by means of noble existential cant the critic wanted to avoid confronting the horror. Herein lies, not least of all, the danger that the horror might recur, that people refuse to let it draw near and indeed even rebuke anyone who merely speaks of it, as though the speaker, if he does not temper things, were the guilty one, and not the perpetrators. With the problem of authority and barbarism I cannot help thinking of an idea that for the most part is hardly taken into account. It comes up in an observation in the book The SS State by Eugen Kogon, which contains central insights into the whole complex and which hasn’t come near to being absorbed by science and educational theory the way it deserves to be.4 Kogon says that the tormentors of the concentration camp where he spent years were for the most part young sons of farmers. The cultural difference between city and country, which still persists, is one of the conditions of the horror, though certainly neither the sole nor the most important one. Any arrogance toward the rural populace is far from my intentions. I know that one cannot help having grown up in a city or a village. I note only that probably debarbarization has been less successful in the open country than anywhere else. Even television and the other mass media probably have not much changed the state of those who have not completely kept up with the culture. It seems to me more correct to say this and to work against it than to praise sentimentally some special qualities of rural life that are threatening to disappear. I will go so far as to claim that one of the most important goals of education is the debarbarization of the countryside. This presupposes, however, a study of the conscious and unconscious of the population there. Above all, one must also consider the impact of modern mass media on a state of consciousness that has not yet come anywhere close to the state of bourgeois liberal culture of the nineteenth century. In order to change this state of consciousness, the normal primary school system, which has several problems in the rural environment, cannot suffice. I can envision a series of possibilities. One would be—I am improvising here—that television programs be planned with consideration of the nerve centers of this particular state of consciousness. Then I could imagine that something like mobile educational groups and convoys of volunteers could be formed, who would drive into the countryside and in discussions, courses, and supplementary instruction attempt to fill the most menacing gaps. I am not ignoring the fact that such people would make themselves liked only with great difficulty. But then a small circle of followers would form around them, and from there the educational program could perhaps spread further. However, there should arise no misunderstanding that the archaic tendency toward violence is also found in urban centers, especially in the larger ones. Regressive tendencies, that is, people with repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today by the global evolution of society. Here I’d like to recall the twisted and pathological relation to the body that Horkheimer and I described in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Everywhere where it is mutilated, consciousness is reflected back upon the body and the sphere of the corporeal in an unfree form that tends toward violence. One need only observe how, with a certain type of uneducated person, his language—above all when he feels faulted or reproached—becomes threatening, as if the linguistic gestures bespoke a physical violence barely kept under control. Here one must surely also study the role of sport, which has been insufficiently investigated by a critical social psychology. Sport is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can have an anti-barbaric and anti-sadistic effect by means of fair play, a spirit of chivalry, and consideration for the weak. On the other hand, in many of its varieties and practices it can promote aggression, brutality, and sadism, above all in people who do not expose themselves to the exertion and discipline required by sports but instead merely watch: that is, those who regularly shout from the sidelines. Such an ambiguity should be analyzed systematically. To the extent that education can exert an influence, the results should be applied to the life of sport. All this is more or less connected with the old authoritarian structure, with modes of behavior, I could almost say, of the good old authoritarian personality. But what Auschwitz produced, the characteristic personality types of the world of Auschwitz, presumably represents something new. On the one hand, those personality types epitomize the blind identification with the collective. On the other hand, they are fashioned in order to manipulate masses, collectives, as Himmler, H¨oss, and Eichmann did. I think the most important way to confront the danger of a recurrence is to work against the brute predominance of all collectives, to intensify the resistance to it by concentrating on the problem of collectivization. That is not as abstract as it sounds in view of the passion with which especially young and progressively minded people desire to integrate themselves into something or other. One could start with the suffering the collective first inflicts upon all the individuals it accepts. One has only to think of one’s own first experiences in school. One must fight against the type of folkways Volkssitten, initiation rites of all shapes, that inflict physical pain—often unbearable pain—upon a person as the price that must be paid in order to consider oneself a member, one of the collective.6 The evil of customs such as the Rauhn¨achte and the Haberfeldtreiben and whatever else such long-rooted practices might be called is a direct anticipation of National Socialist acts of violence.7 It is no coincidence that the Nazis glorified and cultivated such monstrosities in the name of “customs.” Science here has one of its most relevant tasks. It could vigorously redirect the tendencies of folk-studies Volkskunde that were enthusiastically appropriated by the Nazis in order to prevent the survival, at once brutal and ghostly, of these folk-pleasures. This entire sphere is animated by an alleged ideal that also plays a considerable role in the traditional education: the ideal of being hard. This ideal can also, ignominiously enough, invoke a remark of Nietzsche, although he truly meant something else.8 I remember how the dreadful Boger during the Auschwitz trial had an outburst that culminated in a panegyric to education instilling discipline through hardness. He thought hardness necessary to produce what he considered to be the correct type of person.9 This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong. The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism. Being hard, the vaunted quality education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such. In this the distinction between one’s own pain and that of another is not so stringently maintained. Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress. This mechanism must be made conscious, just as an education must be promoted that no longer sets a premium on pain and the ability to endure pain. In other words: education must take seriously an idea in no wise unfamiliar to philosophy: that anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is not repressed, when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the anxiety that this reality warrants, then precisely by doing that, much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced anxiety will probably disappear. People who blindly slot themselves into the collective already make themselves into something like inert material, extinguish themselves as self-determined beings. With this comes the willingness to treat others as an amorphous mass. I called those who behave in this way “the manipulative character” in the Authoritarian Personality, indeed at a time when the diary of H¨oss or the recordings of Eichmann were not yet known.10 My descriptions of the manipulative character date back to the last years of the Second World War. Sometimes social psychology and sociology are able to construct concepts that only later are empirically verified. The manipulative character—as anyone can confirm in the sources available about those Nazi leaders—is distinguished by a rage for organization, by the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism. At any cost he wants to conduct supposed, even if delusional, Realpolitik. He does not for one second think or wish that the world were any different than it is, he is obsessed by the desire of doing things Dinge zu tun, indifferent to the content of such action. He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising image of the active person. If my observations do not deceive me and if several sociological investigations permit generalization, then this type has become much more prevalent today than one would think. What at that time was exemplified in only a few Nazi monsters could be confirmed today in numerous people, for instance, in juvenile criminals, gang leaders, and the like, about whom one reads in the newspapers every day. If I had to reduce this type of manipulative character to a formula—perhaps one should not do it, but it could also contribute to understanding—then I would call it the type of reified consciousness. People of such a nature have, as it were, assimilated themselves to things. And then, when possible, they assimilate others to things. This is conveyed very precisely in the expression “to finish off” “fertigmachen”, just as popular in the world of juvenile rowdies as in the world of the Nazis. This expression defines people as finished or prepared things in a doubled sense. According to the insight of Max Horkheimer, torture is a manipulated and somewhat accelerated adaptation of people to collectives.11 There is something of this in the spirit of the age, though it has little to do with spirit. I merely cite the saying of Paul Val ´ery before the last war, that inhumanity has a great future.12 It is especially difficult to fight against it because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.
9		-Government action is about the process of deliberation not finding an exact rule to follow in every circumstance. Generation of values requires the ability to speak out. Singer 84
10		-
11		-Singer, Joseph William. "The player and the cards: nihilism and legal theory." The Yale Law Journal 94.1 (1984): 1-70.
12		-
13		-Moreover, we cannot respond adequately to problems faced in life by¶ generating abstract moral categories. Discussion of moral and legal choices¶ must focus on the rich context in which those problems occur. For some¶ purposes, it may be useful to characterize two persons as "employer" and¶ "employee" and to develop generalizations to describe and govern their¶ relationships. But it is important to remember that these are real people¶ we are talking about, and when we describe them in this way for the¶ purpose of judging what their relations should be like, we are closing our-¶ selves off from their actual life experiences. We can think impersonally¶ about a busboy as simply representing the table-clearing function; or we¶ can describe him, say, as a forty-year-old man, recently divorced, with¶ back trouble and money problems. As Robert Gordon argues, we need "to¶ unfreeze the world as it appears to common sense as a bunch of more or¶ less objectively determined social relations and to make it appear as (we¶ believe) it really is: people acting, imagining, rationalizing, justifying."'179¶ It may indeed be useful to develop general models to describe social life.¶ But when it comes time to make decisions, we should recognize that we¶ are making decisions rather than discovering ourselves. In making those¶ decisions, it is right to focus on the particular social context, to decide¶ whether our descriptive model actually applies in that case and whether¶ we are allowing the model to turn our attention away from facts that we¶ would otherwise consider to be important. Expressive theory emphasizes the active role of the theorist in deciding¶ how to characterize situations, and in deliberating, conversing, intro-¶ specting, and judging.180 Expressive theory also emphasizes the communal¶ nature of theory and its complex relations with social life. The kernel of¶ truth in the idea of rational consensus is that all ideas and actions involve¶ relations among people. "Individuals do not simply 'have' opinions, they¶ form opinions. . . . The formation of opinions is not a private activity¶ performed by a solitary thinker."'' Traditional theorists have reified the¶ idea of rational consensus by treating it as a basis for what we do, as a¶ source of answers, as a generator of outcomes. But consensus, if it exists,¶ is not something that just happens to be there, that we could describe¶ accurately. It must be created, and the work of creating it is the work and¶ play of daily life, of living, contending, sharing, and being with other peo-¶ ple. Like law, consensus must be made, not found.182¶ Emphasis on the creative, communal nature of common understanding¶ creates an appropriate relationship between thought and action. The proc-¶ ess of generating values is something we do with others in the context of¶ relationships that continue over time.¶ Democratic politics is an encounter among people with differing in-¶ terests, perspectives, and opinions-an encounter in which they re-¶ consider and mutually revise opinions and interests, both individual¶ and common. It happens always in a context of conflict, imperfect¶ knowledge, and uncertainty, but where community action is neces-¶ sary. The resolutions achieved are always more or less temporary,¶ subject to reconsideration, and rarely unanimous. What matters is¶ not unanimity but discourse. The substantive common interest is¶ only discovered or created in democratic political struggle, and it re-¶ mains contested as much as shared. Far from being inimical to de-¶ mocracy, conflict-handled in democratic ways, with openness and¶ persuasion-is what makes democracy work, what makes for the¶ mutual revision of opinions and interest.'83¶ Legal theory can help create communal ties and shared values by freeing¶ us from the sense that current practices and doctrines are natural and¶ necessary and by suggesting new forms of expression to replace outworn¶ ones. For example, Gabel and Harris have suggested replacing our cur- rent rights orientation with a power orientation.'84 They would shift our¶ focus from viewing individuals as abstract citizens whose relations to each¶ other are governed by rights enforced by the state to viewing them as¶ active participants in shaping their relations in daily life. Such changes in¶ language may help focus our attention on facts we had previously ignored¶ and make us more keenly aware of alternative social arrangements.'85
14		-
15		-The law can either be used to forward the claims of the powerless or to perpetuate those of the powerful. We embrace a system of politics that allows for the powerless to speak out. Balkin 08
16		-
17		-Balkin, Jack M. "Critical legal theory today." (2008).
18		-
19		-The relative autonomy of law from politics – rather than its complete¶ autonomy – simultaneously poses a threat and a promise. The threat is that law¶ will fail to do much more than ratify and legitimate the interests of the powerful;¶ the promise is that it might hold off the worst excesses of power by giving people¶ discursive and institutional tools to talk back to power, to restrain its selfishness¶ and inhumanity, and to imagine finer, better visions of human association.¶ The threat and the promise of law are joined together inseparably. What¶ gives law its power to legitimate is its ability to re-describe unjust and unfair¶ events, social practices and institutions in terms of valued ideals of human¶ association like consent, freedom, dignity, equality and fairness. In the hands of¶ lawyers and politicians, law can disguise, mystify and legitimate great injustices¶ using the very ideas and ideals we admire. But law can only do this because it¶ appeals to these values and claims to try to put them into practice through law.¶ Recourse to law forces the powerful to talk in terms in which the powerless can¶ also participate and can also make claims.¶ From this standpoint, law is not simply an efficient tool of power that¶ powerful people and powerful groups can wield any way they like. They do not¶ merely shape the world with it; rather it shapes them and their world, because¶ they have bought into law as a means of achieving and wielding power. Law¶ shapes their beliefs and desires, their sense of the appropriate and the¶ inappropriate, their conceptions of the possible and impossible. Law generates its¶ own institutions and its own demands; it creates its own culture, it is its own form¶ of life; it struggles with other forms of knowledge and power for dominance.¶ That struggle might lead to yet another form of professional power displacing older ones. But it might offer a space for something far more beneficial and¶ noble.¶ The critical approach to law—or at any rate, my version of it—has always¶ been doubled, has always reflected the Janus word “legitimate.” On the one hand,¶ powerful people have used law to subordinate others and secure their own¶ interests under the guise of promoting laudable goals like freedom, equality,¶ liberty, consent, community and human dignity. On the other hand, by choosing¶ to speak in the language of law, powerful people and interests can sometimes be¶ called to account because they try to legitimate what they are doing in those¶ terms. The people they take advantage of can argue that this is a misuse of law,¶ an illegitimate attempt at mystifying rhetoric. They can appeal to the values that¶ law seeks to protect to promote better, more just, and more humane practices and¶ forms of human association.¶ Important theoretical debates among critical scholars in the 1970s and¶ 1980s period revolved around which conception of law was the best one. Some¶ critical scholars adopted a largely pejorative conception, focusing primarily on¶ law’s defects. They argued that the rule of law was enmeshed in irreconcilable¶ contradictions; they denounced rights talk as sterile, useless and¶ counterproductive.5¶ Others, especially feminist and critical race theory scholars,¶ pointed out that rights discourse and rule of law values were among the few¶ resources that disempowered people had.6¶ Rule of law and rights talk were¶ potentially emancipatory discourses. They held a limited but important potential¶ for liberation and for contesting the arbitrary and unjust use of power.¶ These feminist and critical race theorists understood the deemphasized elements – the other side – of critical claims about the relative autonomy of law.¶ They well recognized that rule of law values and rights discourse were hardly¶ perfect – after all, they had been used repeatedly to justify slavery and the¶ subordination of women – but that they had also allowed people to speak out¶ against and to restrain the worst excesses of power. Even in a period of deep¶ skepticism and disillusionment about what law could do, these critical scholars¶ retained a sense of the political importance of rule of law values and rights¶ discourse. That is not because they believed in a strict autonomy of law from¶ politics, but because they understood the political values that legal culture and¶ rights discourse might serve. The best version of critical theory, I think, employs an ambivalent¶ conception of law rather than a pejorative conception: it recognizes law’s relative¶ autonomy from other forms of power in social life, and it understands the dual or¶ Janus-faced nature of that relative autonomy. It sees both law’s limitations in the¶ face of power and its possibilities as a means of channeling power and preventing¶ its most serious injustices.
20		-
21		-Part 2 – The Police State
22		-Qualified immunity reflects a culture of policing that justifies terrorizing black neighborhoods and lets police know they can get away with anything. Carter ‘15
23		-Tom Carter – WSWS Legal Correspondent, a lawyer (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/02/24/cart-f24.html). “US Supreme Court Expands Immunity for Killer Cops.” Center for Research on Globalization. November 12, 2015. http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-supreme-court-expands-immunity-for-killer-cops/5488366 JJN
24		-When a civil rights case is summarily dismissed by a judge on the grounds of “qualified immunity,” the case is legally terminated. It never goes to trial before a jury and is never decided on its constitutional merits. In March of 2010, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chadrin Mullenix climbed onto an overpass with a rifle and, disobeying a direct order from his supervisor, fired six shots at a vehicle that the police were pursuing. Mullenix was not in any danger, and his supervisor had told him to wait until other officers tried to stop the car using spike strips. Four shots struck Israel Leija, Jr., killing him and causing the car, which was going 85 miles per hour, to crash. After the shooting, Mullenix boasted to his supervisor, “How’s that for proactive?” The Luna v. Mullenix case was filed by Leija’s family members, who claimed that Mullenix used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. The district court that originally heard the case, together with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, denied immunity to Mullenix on the grounds that his conduct violated clearly established law. The Supreme Court intervened to uphold the Mullenix’s entitlement to immunity—a decision that will set a precedent for the summary dismissal of civil rights lawsuits against police brutality around the country. This is the Supreme Court’s response to the ongoing wave of police mayhem and murder. The message is clear: The killings will continue. Do not question the police. If you disobey the police, you forfeit your life. So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings. Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car. The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision. The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in aspeech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police. On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly anamicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on. During the imposition of de facto martial law in Ferguson last year, NAPO issued statements vociferously defending Michael Brown’s killer, labeling demonstrators as “violent outsiders,” and denouncing “the violent idiots on the street chanting ‘time to kill a cop!’” “Qualified immunity” is a reactionary doctrine invented by judges in the later part of the 20th century to shield public officials from lawsuits. As a practical matter, this doctrine allows judges to toss out civil rights cases without a jury trial if, in the judge’s opinion, the official misconduct in question was not “plainly incompetent” or a “knowing violation of clearly established law.” Over recent decades, the doctrine has been stretched to Kafkaesque proportions to shield police officers from accountability. In the landmark case ofTennessee v. Garner (1985), the Supreme Court held that it violates the Constitution to shoot an “unarmed, nondangerous fleeing suspect,” and required an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury before the police could open fire. But the Supreme Court in its decision on Monday dismissed this language as constituting a “high level of generality” that was not “particular” enough to “clearly establish” any particular constitutional rights. Since cases that are dismissed on the grounds of qualified immunity do not result in decisions on the constitutional issues, this circular pseudo-logic ensures that no rights will ever be “clearly established.” It also ensures that, instead of the democratic procedure of a jury trial, cases involving the police will be decided by judges. The Supreme Court issued Monday’s decision without full briefing or oral argument, designating it “per curiam,” i.e., in the name of the court, not any specific judges. Justice Antonin Scalia filed a concurring opinion, displaying his trademark sophistry. According to Scalia, Mullenix did not use “deadly force” within the meaning of the Supreme Court’s prior cases, since he was shooting at a car, not a person. (Four bullets struck Leija, but none of the six shots struck the engine block at which Mullenix was supposedly aiming.) Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed the sole dissent, noting that this decision “renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow,” and sanctions a “shoot first, think later” approach to policing. However, Sotomayor wrote that she would have used a “balancing” analysis instead, in which a “particular government interest” would need to be “balanced” against the use of deadly force. This “balancing” rhetoric mirrors the Obama administration’s justifications for assassination and domestic spying, according to which national security is balanced against democratic rights. The Bill of Rights itself—that old, yellow, forgotten piece of paper—does not make itself contingent on the subjective mental states of police officers, “clearly established law,” or the “balancing” of “government interests.” America confronts a massive social crisis. Decades of endless war and occupations abroad, the degradation of wages and living conditions at home, the enrichment of a tiny layer of financial criminals at the expense of the rest of the society, rampant speculation and corruption at the highest levels—these factors contribute to mounting social tensions and the danger, from the standpoint of the ruling class, of the growth of social opposition. Such opposition can already be seen, in its earliest stages, in the struggle by autoworkers against the sellout contract being imposed by the United Auto Workers union. Like the tyrant who proposes to solve the problem of hunger by imposing a hefty fine on everyone who starves, the Supreme Court’s decision Monday confirms that the entire social system has nothing to offer by way of a solution to the crisis except more of the same. The abrogation of democratic rights, torture, military commissions, drone assassinations, unlimited surveillance, the lockdown of entire cities, internment camps, beatings, murder, martial law, war—this is how the ruling class plans to deal with the social crisis. Notwithstanding the epidemic of police violence, the flow of unlimited cash and military hardware to police departments from the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon continues unabated. The buildup of the police as a militarized occupation force operating outside the law, pumped up and ready to kill, must be seen as a part of preparations by the ruling class for mass repression and dictatorship in response to the growth of working class opposition.
25		-
26		-Qualified immunity makes questions of civil rights irrelevant. It shuts down democratic debates about which rights we should value and prevents forms of activism that fight for legal recognition. Hassel ‘99
27		-
28		-Diana Hassel - Associate Professor, Roger Williams University School of Law. B.A. 1979, Mount Holyoke College; J.D. 1985, Rutgers, the State University of New JerseyNewark. “Living a Lie: The Cost of Qualified Immunity.” Missouri Law Review. Winter 1999. http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3402andcontext=mlr JJN
29		-
30		-IV. THE COST OF QUALIFIED IMMUNITY Qualified immunity has not been universally admired. A large body of literature critiques the defense and calls for its modification, elimination, or expansion. While these critiques serve to illuminate some fundamental problems with the qualified immunity doctrine, they do not address the central problem with qualified immunity-its camouflaging effect. By camouflaging effect, I mean the ability of qualified immunity to make the underlying pattern of civil. rights doctrine undiscernible. The existing critical focus on the strengths and weaknesses of qualified immunity fails to uncover the underlying patterns in the availability of Section 1983 remedies. A. Current Critiques There are vociferous critics of the qualified immunity doctrine who attack the doctrine as a whole. This commentary suggests that the problem with the qualified immunity doctrine is that it is applied to the wrong group of defendants or that it should be eliminated entirely. Those who believe that it should be eliminated entirely generally seek to substitute governmental liability for that of individual government officials. 6 Others believe that the problem is not with the defense but that its application should be available only to a certain small group of government officials." 7 The bulk of the criticism of qualified immunity looks closely at the structure of the defense and argues that it is internally contradictory or should be modified to provide better results. This criticism breaks into two main areas: the problems inherent in the "reasonableness" element". of the qualified immunity defense and the difficulties that result from the attempt to define "clearly established""' 9 law. The complaints concerning the "reasonableness" element note that while the objective reasonableness element is designed to protect the defendant from protracted litigation, the defense does not really quickly resolve a lawsuit. 120 The fact issues raised by the reasonableness element of the defense require a fact-finding hearing which makes it difficult to end lawsuits prior to trial.' 2 ' In a contradictory approach, the objectively reasonable element also has been described as being essentially a bar to judgment for the plaintiff in a civil rights action. Because qualified immunity is designed to protect defendants notjust from liability, but from participation in litigation, some argue that qualified immunity has become essentially indistinguishable from absolute immunity.' 22 The objectively reasonable standard is also seen as a mechanism for the distortion of constitutional law. The focus on the question of what a reasonable official would have understood the law to require leads to a "redefining of the substantive constitutional law" in a way that gives little clear guidance as to what the constitution requires and thus provides little guidance for future actions.'23 Commentators similarly claim that the impact of the clearly established element of the qualified immunity defense is inefficient, distorts the law, and is too difficult a standard for plaintiffs to overcome. It is inefficient and distorting because courts spend their time reconstructing what the law was in the past rather than setting forth clear guidance as to what the law requires. 124 The qualified immunity defense has also been assailed because of its requirement that a constitutional right must be clearly established before any liability can attach. This is a difficult standard to overcome. 2 ' The difficulty in identifying clear legal authority establishing the unlawfulness of a particular official's act may be too difficult a task and thus exclude meritorious claims. 26 There is then a body of literature examining the discrepancy between what the qualified immunity defense was meant to accomplish and how it actually works. The defense does not protect defendants in a meaningful way. At the same time, it makes a judgment for the plaintiff almost impossible to obtain. Therefore, the defense seems to be serving no one's interests. These well documented weaknesses suggest that qualified immunity's role is not to allow for just outcomes, but to provide some other service. What is missing from these critiques is an analysis of what function the current doctrine serves. In the next section, I explain that while qualified immunity often results in unfairness or inefficiency, the doctrine also provides a flexible mechanism by which divisive issues are seemingly resolved. This mechanism, however, has a cost. B. Qualified Immunity as a Disquise The problem with qualified immunity is not so much that the outcomes are sometimes unfair but the fact that qualified immunity blocks a clear view of the real limitations that exist in civil rights law. Civil rights law is, in effect, being designed in the dark. Distinctions are being made about the types of cases that will receive compensation and the types that will not. These distinctions are not articulated as such; instead, the results are understood to be the result of the qualified immunity defense. As we have seen, for example, a procedural complaint in the context of an employment dispute is more likely to survive the qualified immunity defense than is a complaint about whether a police officer used excessive force in the arrest of a dangerous suspect. Rather than organizing civil rights law in these categorical ways, however, qualified immunity makes the civil rights remedial system appear to be about individual cases and the reasonableness of individual defendants. Current qualified immunity doctrine serves as a means to diffuse conflict. Without a clear rule that some kinds of civil rights harms will not be redressed, there is minimal pressure for change. This "hiding of the ball" quality of qualified immunity is why, in spite of many expressions of dissatisfaction with the system, there had been little effective rallying for change. The reason the discontent of the participants in this system has not led to a significant change is that the terms of the debate are defined by the immunity system rather than by the fundamental question of the extent of rights and liabilities in civil rights actions. The civil rights remedial scheme organized around qualified immunity thus has an inherently self-preserving or stabilizing quality. It allows for tinkering at the margins, but fundamental recasting of the terms of the debate is unlikely. My assertion that qualified immunity has a camouflaging effect on civil rights law is supported by a large body of scholarship that explores legal regimes that define reality in a way that limits the ability of the participants in the system to change it.'27 These scholars argue that when a legal system is accepted as being the only available way to organize an activity and thus seems inevitable, the legal system encourages acceptance of the status quo. 28 The insights gained by scholars working in this area are helpful to apply to the qualified immunity standard in order to explore its hold on the civil rights imagination. This analysis maps out the way a doctrine such as qualified immunity can develop into an obstacle to the very aims it professes to accomplish. Particularly apposite to an analysis of civil rights law is the work that has been done on the change-inhibiting impact of the development of antidiscrimination law.129 In commenting on the effect of the adoption of equal rights rhetoric on the struggle to end racial inequality, Kimberle Crenshaw has concluded that "society's adoption of the ambivalent rhetoric of equal opportunity law has made it that much more difficult for Black people to name their reality. While equal employment opportunity law has been adopted, the material reality of most Black people has not improved."'30 In fact, improvement may be hindered by the existence of the equal opportunity law since it may undermine the political consensus necessary for change.' 3 ' Another commentator has suggested that "the language of rights undermines efforts to change things by absorbing real demands, experiences, and concerns into a vacuous and indeterminate discourse. The discourse abstracts real experience and clouds the ability of those who invoke rights rhetoric to think concretely about real confrontations and real circumstances.' 32 The existence of antidiscrimination law can thus create the appearance of improvements in racial equality while at the same time not encouraging fundamental change. 33 The focus on the intent of the actor in equal protection claims rather than the impact on the person experiencing the discrimination has also been criticized as an inhibitor to the elimination of racial inequality. 3 By paying exclusive attention to the blameworthiness of the defendant, an examination of the impact of the challenged practice on those complaining about it is lost. Fairness to the defendant, rather than eliminating discriminatory effect, is the central concern. These commentators suggest that the economic and social reality of race inequality is obscured by the existence of antidiscrimination law and by the success of a small exceptional group. As Derrick Bell has stated, "Discrimination claims when they are dramatic enough and do not threaten majority concerns, are given a sympathetic hearing, but there is a pervasive sense that definite limits have been set on the weight that minority claims receive when balanced against majority interests."'35 While it is unclear what the alternative to antidiscrimination law is, these critiques strongly argue that antidiscrimination law does not do what it suggests it will do and may, in fact, make a better system more difficult to imagine and thus to create. This current critique of antidiscrmination law can be used to understand how the qualified immunity standard affects the system of compensation for constitutional wrongs. One major similarity is the way in which the existence of Section 1983 siphons off pressure to create some other system of redress. The open-ended language of the Section 1983 statute seems to promise a powerful remedy against governmental abuse. As we have seen, qualified immunity severely limits that remedy, but on a case-by-case basis. There is no general prohibition against certain types of civil rights claims, only the seemingly individualized application of the qualified immunity defense. The fact that some types of claims are destined to fail because of the type of claim they are, not because of the particularized behavior of the defendant, is hidden. Adding to the illusion of a generally available remedy is the spectacular success of a few high profile cases. A few large recoveries in cases that present particularly compelling facts obscure the reality of the fruitlessness of most claims. 36 On the other side of the lawsuit, qualified immunity promises much more to the defendant than it delivers. The defense is supposed to protect government actors not only from liability but also from entanglement with litigation. The promise is often not kept because the qualified immunity defense presents a combination of fact and law questions that cannot be quickly disposed of prior to trial. However, the theoretical protection offered by the defense and the low incidence of actual judgments against government actors lulls government employees into acquiescence to the system. The emphasis that qualified immunity places on the reasonableness of the defendant's actions rather than on whether a constitutional right was violated is another way in which qualified immunity distorts civil rights law. Qualified immunity makes the essential issue of a civil rights claim the question of whether it would be too much of an inhibitor of government action to require a particular defendant to pay damages to the plaintiff. The focus is not, at least initially, on whether the plaintiffs constitutional rights were violated. This emphasis also makes it difficult to discern and consider which rights are or should be protected and which we are content not to protect with monetary compensation. Qualified immunity's harm is that it makes it difficult to see the policy choices made by courts in civil rights actions. Cloaking these policy choices in the qualified immunity doctrine avoids the possibility of an open debate concerning which civil rights should be protected and how. VI. CONCLUSION Given its obvious flaws, the continuation of qualified immunity as the key legal issue in civil rights cases can only be explained by the hidden purpose it serves; it avoids the divisive and perhaps unresolvable conflicts among participants in civil rights litigation. Qualified immunity accomplishes this conflict-avoiding function by giving judges wide latitude in making determinations about its application and by couching the outcomes of civil rights litigation in terms that make the substantive results difficult to perceive. These qualities account for the faithful adherence to a doctrine that is regarded as so unsatisfactory to so many. The problem with this conflict avoidance mechanism is that it allows unarticulated decisions to be made about the extent of liability for civil rights violations. Civil rights litigation does have limitations to it; every case is not given an opportunity to succeed. These determinations are being made; they are just not described as such. Using qualified immunity as a shield from the truth may buy us peace, but it keeps from us the tools required for reform.
31		-
32		-
33		-Excessive force is the worst manifestation of this form of violence – 4th amendment cases get shut down before they even have a chance. Jeffries ‘13
34		-
35		-Jeffries Jr, John C - David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, the University of Virginia. "The Liability Rule for Constitutional Torts." Virginia Law Review (2013): 207-270.
36		-Finally, special mention must be made of the case of excessive force.¶ The unconstitutional use of excessive force presents the most glaring¶ case of the inadequacy of current law. To some extent, that reflects the¶ intractability of the underlying problem of persuading officers who may¶ be excited, adrenalin-rushed, and fearful to be more restrained in the use¶ of force, especially deadly force. The intersection of qualified immunity¶ and excessive force claims raises in a particularly troubling context an¶ issue that can be put more generally: what role should qualified immunity¶ play for rights defined in terms of reasonableness? The question was¶ first raised by Justice Stevens in his dissent in Anderson,¶ 217 where the¶ majority applied qualified immunity to an unlawful search. Justice Stevens¶ objected to what he called a “double standard of reasonableness.”218¶ Since the Fourth Amendment forbids only “unreasonable” searches and¶ seizures, he argued, extending qualified immunity to invasions found to¶ violate that standard introduced “two layers of insulation from liability” and led to a logical contradiction: “I remain convinced that in a suit for¶ damages as well as in a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence, ‘an¶ official search and seizure cannot be both “unreasonable” and “reasonable”¶ at the same time.’”219 Since allowance for reasonable error was already¶ built into the definition of the constitutional right, Stevens argued,¶ allowing the officers to claim qualified immunity unjustifiably gave¶ them “two bites at the apple.”220 Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia¶ rejected the “‘reasonably unreasonable’ argument” as little more than a¶ play on words.221 The fact that Fourth Amendment doctrine (including¶ the warrant requirement and the specification of exigent circumstances)¶ had developed under the rubric of “unreasonable searches and seizures”¶ did not mean that one could not be reasonably mistaken about specific¶ questions. Application of qualified immunity to Fourth Amendment protections¶ was in principle no different from its application to any other¶ constitutional guarantee.¶ Logically, Scalia is right. The phrasing of the Fourth Amendment¶ does not preclude the possibility of reasonable mistake. On any of the¶ component issues of Fourth Amendment doctrine (probable cause, exigent¶ circumstances, and the like), an officer could be reasonably mistaken¶ about whether his or her conduct violated clearly established law.¶ Analytically, there is no conceptual contradiction in applying qualified¶ immunity to the Fourth Amendment. At a deeper level, however, Stevens has a point. That point arises not¶ from the fact that the Fourth Amendment uses the term “unreasonable”¶ but rather from the construction of a constitutional standard that seemingly¶ encompasses within its terms all possibility of reasonable mistake.¶ The archetype of such a standard, however, is not ordinary search and¶ seizure but the constitutional prohibition against excessive force.¶ The Supreme Court has said in Graham v. Connor that claims of excessive¶ force should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and that¶ the test is one of “objective reasonableness.”222 This label might suggest a standard that is cut-and-dried, but in fact it is highly variable and particular.¶ Factors such as the severity of the suspected crime and whether¶ the suspect is actively resisting arrest are not to be assessed “with the¶ 20/20 vision of hindsight” but from the perspective of the officer on the¶ scene, with limited time and information and under conditions of emergency.223¶ As the Court put it, “The calculus of reasonableness must embody¶ allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make¶ split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and¶ rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular¶ situation.”224 The result is a general concept, unmediated by specific¶ implementing rules or doctrines, that takes all relevant circumstances¶ into account. All the mistakes that an officer might make—such¶ as misidentifying the suspect or erroneously thinking him armed or¶ overestimating the risk of civil disorder if a loud-mouth is not subdued—are¶ subsumed within the constitutional standard, so long as those¶ mistakes are reasonable. To find a violation of the constitutional standard,¶ the court or jury must conclude that, taking into account all the circumstances¶ that might excuse misjudgment, the use of force was unreasonable.¶ To then say that the unreasonable use of force might¶ nevertheless be reasonable is indeed puzzling.¶ The Supreme Court (per Justice Kennedy) explained the matter as follows:¶ It is sometimes difficult for an officer to determine how the relevant¶ legal doctrine, here excessive force, will apply to the factual situation¶ the officer confronts. An officer might correctly perceive all of the¶ relevant facts but have a mistaken understanding as to whether a particular¶ amount of force is legal in those circumstances. If the officer’s¶ mistake as to what the law requires is reasonable, however, the officer¶ is entitled to the qualified immunity defense.225¶ This statement is confusing and has worked much mischief, but it is not¶ analytically unsound. The confusion arises from trying to imagine how a reasonable officer could be mistaken about the “relevant legal doctrine”¶ when it consists only of the injunction that the use of force be reasonable.¶ Every officer would know that, and not knowing it would itself be¶ unreasonable. It is nevertheless true that an officer on the scene and a¶ subsequent trier of fact might evaluate the reasonable use of force (from¶ the perspective of the officer on the scene, etc.) differently. In that case,¶ one might say, with the Supreme Court, that the officer would have a¶ “mistaken understanding as to whether a particular amount of force is¶ legal” and that if the officer’s misjudgment of that issue were very¶ slight, it might be deemed reasonable.226 By this reasoning, qualified¶ immunity would still have some role to play in borderline applications¶ of a constitutional standard based entirely on reasonableness.¶ An alternative understanding—which seems to me the better understanding—would¶ treat the trier of fact’s evaluation as conclusive of reasonableness,¶ as is done for example in negligence cases. Conceptually,¶ the difference between these approaches lies in whether one conceives¶ of the officer as trying to anticipate the judgment of a trier of fact (in¶ which case a borderline error might be deemed reasonable) or as trying¶ to adhere to the underlying standard governing both officer and trier of¶ fact (in which case the latter’s determination would be conclusive). The¶ latter characterization seems more appropriate in this context and is certainly¶ more straightforward, but the former characterization is more consistent¶ with the overall structure of qualified immunity, which traditionally¶ focuses on mistake as to legality.¶ Whatever view one takes of this matter, it seems plain that qualified¶ immunity would impart only a very slight addition to the protections¶ built into the constitutional standard for excessive force. Given that reasonable¶ mistakes and misjudgments preclude finding a constitutional violation¶ in the first place, it is hard to see much room for the operation of¶ qualified immunity. At most, it would add a very narrow zone of additional¶ protection in truly borderline cases.¶ This is not, however, the lesson of the cases. Courts have been told¶ that qualified immunity applies to claims of excessive force, that reasonable¶ mistakes in light of “clearly established” law should trigger qualified¶ immunity despite the “objective unreasonableness” of the actor’s¶ conduct, and that “clearly established” law depends on similar precedent.¶ This cumulation of messages, powerfully reinforced by Brosseau v. Haugen,¶ 227 has led many lower courts to reject civil liability for excessive¶ force in circumstances where such liability seems fully justified. As¶ usual, the culprit is the unlikelihood of finding another excessive-force¶ case in that jurisdiction with sufficiently similar facts.
37		-Part 3 - The plan
38		-The Supreme Court of the United States will limit qualified immunity by altering the ‘clearly established’ element of qualified immunity to be merely whether it was unconstitutional in civil suits claiming a violation of the 4th amendment due to excessive force. Wright ‘15
39		-Sam Wright is a public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. “Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity.” Above the Law. November 3, 2015. http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/?rf=1 JJN
40		-As usual, I’ve not buried the lede: that something is qualified immunity reform. In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts?
41		-
42		-
43		-The AFF changes police behavior – lawsuits are used by departments to create reform and individuals know their behavior will be watched – they don’t’ even need to win the lawsuits. Schwartz 10
44		-Schwartz, Joanna. "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo Law Review, 2010. http://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/event/265497/media/slspublic/What_Police_Learn_From_Lawsuits.pdf. SGK
45		-Lawsuits are widely recognized to compensate and deter; this Article shows suits can also inform. In the departments in this study, lawsuits reveal allegations of misconduct that officials investigate and consider with other data for possible trends. The evidence developed in discovery and trial offers a detailed picture of underlying events that can help identify personnel and policy failures. Closed case files, compared with internal investigations, reveal weaknesses in internal procedures. And trends in settlements and judgments, like initial claim trends, highlight units that officials should more carefully review. Viewed in isolation or in conjunction with other data, lawsuits offer insights about the incidence and causes of individual and organizational failings. And armed with these insights, departments find ways to improve. This view of litigation – as a source of information that can be used to identify and reduce harm and error – parts company with prevailing understand- ings of lawsuits’ role in organizational performance improvement. In the standard story, lawsuits’ financial costs are expected to deter misbehavior.242 Others contend that police officials will be deterred by lawsuits only when the suits jeopardize political capital, bureaucratic and administrative needs, or crime control efforts.243 But all expect that it is lawsuits’ punitive effects that inspire performance improvement. High profile and costly cases can, most certainly, affect change in law enforcement. Indeed, several of the departments in this study began reviewing lawsuit data as a response to significant political and financial pressures.244 But these departments do not limit their attention to cases that garner high payouts or press attention. Instead, they gather information about legal claims, evidence, and dispositions of all cases, even those without financial and political ramifications. Deterrence theory also imagines that officials deciding which course of action to take weigh the costs of litigation against the benefits of the underlying conduct.245 But the policies in place in the departments in this study do not facilitate this sort of weighing. Departments would not, for example, track lawsuits alleging chokeholds and then decide whether to retrain their officers about the impropriety of chokeholds based on the costs of these suits.246 Instead, departments in this study would use lawsuits, with other data, to identify chokeholds as behavior that triggered a concentration of suits, civilian complaints, and/or use-of-force reports. The department then would conduct an investigation and identify ways to address the underlying policy, training, or personnel problems. And when a department looks for trends in payouts, officials do not weigh those judgments and settlements against the costs of potential policy changes. Instead, the concentration of settlements and judgments is treated as an indication of an underlying problem that is then investigated and analyzed. In differentiating department practices from deterrence models, I do not mean to suggest that these departments never engage in cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, department officials likely weigh the costs and benefits of their actions at multiple points during information gathering, analysis, and decisionmaking. When LASD’s Century Station was identified as having a high concentration of payouts, department officials likely considered the bureaucratic and administrative costs of focusing public attention on that station when deciding what course of action to pursue.247 When Portland’s auditor identified a number of incidents suggesting that officers did not understand their authority to enter a home without a warrant, department officials likely weighed the financial costs of various interventions before deciding to make a training video that clarified officers’ legal obligations.248 This type of cost-benefit analysis is far more nuanced and complex than is suggested by formal models of deterrence. And lawsuits’ role in this cost- benefit analysis is not as a “cost” but, instead, as one of many sources of information. Others have recognized that information generated by litigation can serve a regulatory function. Lawsuits challenging the gun industry, clergy sexual abuse, tobacco, and breast implant manufacturers have generated information that supplemented regulatory efforts.249 The revelation of damaging information can also pressure police departments to change their behavior.250 In these contexts, the public disclosure of litigation data caused third parties to influence organizations to improve. The departments in this study reveal that litigation can also generate information previously unavailable to the very entity that is sued. Although these departments view lawsuits as a valuable source of infor- mation, they recognize that the information is flawed.251 Information produced internally – through civilian complaints and use of force reports – is flawed as well.252 The approach of the departments in this study is not to ignore information because of its imperfections, but instead to review data from multiple sources with the hopes that imperfections will be minimized by a holistic approach. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s policies “consciously were fashioned to create multiple, new, and even redundant sources of information.”253
46		-
47		-
48		-The AFF changes culture – it is a form of social condemnation that validates the claims of the survivor. Armacost 98
49		-
50		-Armacost 98 Barbara Armacost, Vanderbilt Law Review, April, 1998, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=90852, “Qualified Immunity: Ignorance Excused,” WP
51		-
52		-If constitutional rights are especially valued in comparison with other kinds of rights, it follows that constitutional violations would be viewed by society as especially serious and deserving of opprobrium. There is reason to think this is so. Constitutional violations, especially those that are likely to give rise to section 1983 suits, involve abuses of power by governmental actors. The implications of official misconduct go far beyond the concrete harm to persons or property suffered by any one individual. Public officials are, after all, charged with upholding and enforcing the law and acting for the public good. When officials use their public offices to engage in lawbreaking, there is a betrayal of trust that is experienced not only by the individual, but by the entire community. n432 Consider, for example, *675 the public outcry that was engendered by the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. The image of a circle of uniformed law enforcement officials beating an unarmed man lying crumpled on the ground is troubling in a way that a private beating is not. Similar reactions accompanied recent allegations that New York City police officers openly beat and sodomized (with a toilet plunger) a young Haitian immigrant in the bathroom at the police station. n433 When the malefactor is a governmental official whose injurious conduct was made possible by her official authority and position, "ordinary injury is augmented by the abuse of governmental power." n434 In such cases wrongdoing that could "be described as trespass, assault and battery, false imprisonment, or defamation takes on new urgency." n435 If the law-enforcers cannot be trusted to conduct themselves according to the law, then who can? Governmental abuse of power creates a sense of indignation on the part of the governed, and special opprobrium is reserved for abusers of the public trust. n436∂ If individual liability for constitutional violations entails wrongdoing and signals societal condemnation, then it would make sense to retain such liability even if the financial burden is ultimately borne by the governmental employer rather than by the individual official. n437 Indeed, in the criminal context it has been argued that the *676 moral blame entailed by a criminal conviction is more important in discouraging antisocial conduct than the threat of official sanctions. n438 One need not go that far to accept that the human desire to avoid societal opprobrium plays an important role in gaining compliance with the criminal law. n439 Similarly, the societal condemnation accompanying damages liability for constitutional violations enhances the law's power to reduce unconstitutional conduct and reinforce constitutional norms. Moreover, the stigma entailed in such liability plays an important role in communicating those norms, not only through final verdicts in courts but through public reaction to reported allegations of clear constitutional impropriety.
53		-The plan fosters cooperation, which operates as a key check against police departments. Stefan ‘16
54		-Lindsey de Stefan - J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law; B.A., Ramapo College of New Jersey. ““No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct.” The date is claimed to be 2017… but that’s impossible. So it says it has had 360 downloads since July 26, 2016 which is when the article is most likely to have been assumed to be released on the website. Stetan Hall Law. http://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1861andcontext=student_scholarship JJN
55		-VI. Amending Qualified Immunity Doctrine as a Catalyst for Curbing Police Violence Altering the qualified immunity doctrine is an excellent way to begin the path to restoring trust by establishing a much-needed sense of accountability. Civil remedies are a good jumping off point because, as repeated failures to indict officers—even in the face of video footage—have demonstrated, accountability via the criminal law is a far-off possibility, if it is possible at all. Prosecutors are generally disinclined to bring charges against law enforcement officers, 140 and grand juries are equally as hesitant to indict them.141 Independent investigations, as suggested by the Task Force, are an excellent idea, but establishing a feasible system nationwide would take time. On the other hand, Supreme Court amendment of the stringent immunity afforded to police officers could take effect relatively quickly. Of course, this is easier said than done. The Court has increasingly enlarged the immunity afforded to police officers in its recent decisions, and any 180-degree turnaround would likely require a change in Court composition. But the current Court can nevertheless begin to firm up qualified immunity doctrine by simply providing more guidance and clarification, thereby enhancing accountability and reaffirming trust between law enforcement and their respective communities. The concept of a clearly established right is, in many ways, a problem that requires solving. A substantial number of cases are disposed of on the premise that a right was not “clearly established”—yet lower courts have struggled for years with what those words actually mean. Arguably, then, at least some officers are escaping liability simply because of the Court’s repeated failures to establish consistency in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. But if the Court used qualified immunity opinions to demonstrate what qualifies as a clearly established right by meticulously outlining its reasoning in answering whether a set of facts implicates such a right, the Court could alleviate some confusion. In other words, rather than taking cases simply to overturn the lower courts’ denial of immunity, it could take cases to affirm those denials or, alternatively, to reverse lower courts’ grant of immunity. By so doing, the Court can give examples of what constitutes a right that is “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right,”142 and can give lower courts somewhat of a guide to follow. By elucidating the contours of the clearly established right, the Court would alleviate some of the confusion of lower courts and ensure that they are in fact applying that part of the test properly. Proper application of this prong directly promotes accountability, as the public can rest assured that, at least in that regard, cases are not being disposed of based merely on perplexity and uncertainty. Moreover, increased confidence about the clearly established prong could foster a willingness to take on the second part of the test and, in so doing, advance the development of constitutional law and clarify further constitutional rights. The Court could also accept that its attempts at a general standard for all classes of officials that are not otherwise entitled to absolute immunity has been problematic and hugely unsuccessful. Though the Court apparently fears “complicating” qualified immunity, the doctrine is quite complicated as is, and adopting more particularized classes of officials with different standards of immunity would not only assist lower courts in properly analyzing immunity, but would promote justice in constitutional tort litigation. For example, the Court could classify officials based on the approximate number of people with whom they come in contact, so to speak, and that might therefore bring civil suits against them. A governor, for example, could theoretically face a lawsuit from any resident of the state, and would thus be afforded more stringent protection—much like the standard afforded to all officials now. But law enforcement officers, who come in contact with only the residents of one town, city, or perhaps county, risk possible suits from a much smaller pool of people. The threat of litigation would therefore be much less crippling on governmental function, and immunity protection need not be so rigorous. In the case of allegations of Fourth Amendment violations, in light of the already-existing reasonableness standard, immunity may be inappropriate altogether. In addition, the Court could do its proverbial homework and take notice of the widespread indemnification of officers that often results in a complete absence of financial or employmentrelated consequences for law enforcement. If the Court stopped relying on its own intuition, and instead came to grip with the facts, it would likely realize that it has been overzealous in protecting low-level officers, and be inclined to alter course somewhat. By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. VII. Conclusion By adopting different immunity standards for high-level and low-level officials, clarifying the vagueness surrounding the definition of a “clearly established” right, and acknowledging the real-world effects of indemnification, the Court can begin to repair some of the substantial flaws in its qualified immunity jurisprudence. As it does, it will permit more constitutional tort suits to succeed, thereby fostering law enforcement accountability. Because criminal liability is nearly impossible as a practical matter, and because strategies like improving police training and recruiting tactics will likely take years to effectively implement, civil suits are the (relatively) fastest way to demonstrate to the country that our officers are our guardians and that they are accountable to us. It is thus the most immediate way to rebuild trust and begin healing the citizen police relationship.
56		-
57		-And, police won’t give up on policing – they will just change their behavior. The AFF forces de-escalation. Oliver 15
58		-Oliver, Wesley. "Prohibition’s Lingering Shadow: Under-Regulation of Official Uses of Force." Http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4165andcontext=mlr. 2015. SP
59		-
60		-Unnecessary police killings may be deterred by internal department sanctions, state torts, civil rights actions, state homicide prosecutions, and federal civil rights prosecutions. Each of these potential sanctions ultimately turns on some version of a reasonableness standard that provides little in the way of details about when police are allowed to use deadly force. For all the possible penalties other than internal departmental sanctions, jurors or grand jurors must decide without the benefit of any sort of precedent.5 Using these mechanisms, courts have done virtually nothing to define the contours of the reasonableness standard that governs official uses of force.6 Further, courts have aggressively shielded officers from civil liabil- ity.7 The bulk of claims against police officers for excessive force are litigated in federal civil rights actions.8 Litigants must contend not only with a vague reasonableness standard when the case goes to a jury, but they must also overcome an officer’s qualified immunity defense.9 Qualified immunity is designed to ensure that police will not be over-deterred through the threat of a large jury verdict.10 Courts ruling on this defense at the summary judgment phase have been very deferential to what courts frequently describe as the split-second decision to use force.11 The vague reasonableness standard is thus only defined by courts in the context of the police-friendly qualified immunity context, which essentially leaves reasonableness to be defined by officers.12 The absence of clarity is problematic for officers attempting to comply with the law and for those who must judge officers’ conduct. With little guidance, through precedent or otherwise, to define reasonableness, officers are not sure when they have a duty to de-escalate a potentially violent encounter.13 Grand jurors judging officers’ conduct are similarly unable to determine when an officer’s course of conduct has been unreasonable. Decisions to charge or not charge officers are thus often criticized as the product of racial bias, rather than sound judgment, as only vague standards govern their considerations.14 By contrast, relatively clear standards govern police searches to discover evidence. The famed Supreme Court of California Justice Roger J. Traynor, who introduced the exclusionary rule into California jurisprudence, observed that as a result of the rule, “police now have a clearer idea than before of the restraints upon them.”15 The exclusionary rule has given a large number of defendants a reason to assert that police engaged in misconduct in gathering evidence.16 In each of these cases, a judge is required to rule on the admissibility of the challenged evidence and provide reasons that inform future po-l’ lice conduct, as well as subsequent judicial decisions.17 The frequency of Fourth Amendment litigation has provided courts an opportunity to address the contours of most investigative techniques

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-2016-11-06 20:29:13.0

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Miyamoto, Dan

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Loyola GR

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-1

Round

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-1

Team

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Harvard Westlake Mork Aff

Title

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Damus AFF

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,0 @@
1		-Damus