Qualified Immunity: Ignorance Excused

Public officials receive qualified immunity from damages liability for constitutional violations if they reasonably could have believed their actions were constitutional under clearly established law. In this regard qualified immunity is quite unusual. In most other legal contexts, failure to know the law is virtually never excused. The only other context where notice or knowledge of illegality plays any role is in criminal law, but even mistakes of penal law are rarely excused. In this Article, Professor Armacost uses fair notice in criminal law as a paradigm for analyzing the role of notice in constitutional damages actions. She argues that fair notice in the criminal context is a proxy for fault. Whereas in most criminal cases fault inheres in the wrongfulness of the prohibited conduct, notice becomes important when only an intentional violation of a known legal duty makes the defendant blameworthy. In such cases, the notice inquiry ensures against penal liability without fault. Professor Armacost then applies the paradigm of notice as a proxy for fault to qualified immunity. The animating notion behind the immunity inquiry is that it would be unfair to hold officials to rules they could not reasonably have known. The objective clarity of the law acts as a surrogate for the official\u27s subjective state of mind: If the law governing the official\u27s con- duct was clear, immunity is denied because any reasonably conscientious official would have known and obeyed the law. Conversely, an official who engaged in conduct that was neither clearly prohibited nor contained indicia of its own wrongfulness is not blameworthy and immunity will attach. In such cases, qualified immunity\u27s notice inquiry-whether the law was clear-acts as a proxy for fault. Finally, Professor Armacost argues that the fault-notice connection borrowed from criminal law explains a puzzling feature of constitutional damages law: The Supreme Court has repeatedly stressed the importance of individual, fault-based liability and resisted a move toward respondeat superior liability. However, the ubiquity of indemnification of individual officials by their governmental units means that officials rarely bear the monetary burden of liability. Professor Armacost contends that fault-based, individual liability-which identifies a particular official as a constitutional wrongdoer --serves a moral blaming function that has significant independent value regardless of who ultimately bears the financial responsibility