Abolishing qualified immunity won’t flood the courts with frivolous suits and the cases that are dismissed on qualified immunity grounds are the more egregious ones

Police Reforms Must Be Fair and Workable. Letter to The WSJ.

"Mr. Mangual expresses skepticism about efforts to abolish qualified immunity, arguing—citing my research—that the doctrine “isn’t successfully invoked that often” and so doesn’t undermine police accountability.

Mr. Mangual misreads my research. In the study he references, I found that qualified immunity resulted in the dismissal of less than 4% of the 1,183 police misconduct lawsuits I examined. But my findings do not suggest qualified immunity is ineffectual—instead, they reveal the many other barriers to relief in civil-rights cases. The vast majority of unsuccessful lawsuits in my study failed for reasons other than qualified immunity, including because plaintiffs didn’t adequately describe their legal claims in their initial filings and because plaintiffs’ evidence didn’t establish a constitutional violation.

These findings show that abolishing qualified immunity won’t flood the courts with frivolous suits. Weaker cases will continue to be weeded out in a world without qualified immunity. Crucially, this also means that the cases that are dismissed on qualified immunity grounds are the more egregious ones, since the courts weren’t able to get rid of them using these other procedural vehicles.

Make no mistake: Qualified immunity absolutely undermines police accountability. When courts do consider qualified-immunity motions, they regularly grant them, denying relief to people whose rights have been violated. And these qualified immunity decisions undermine accountability more generally by sending the message that police can violate people’s rights without consequence.

Prof. Joanna C. Schwartz
UCLA"