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Monday, June 19, 2017

SCOTUS Symposium: Setting fire to House Bivens

"If you're cold, put on a sweater, perhaps an overcoat, perhaps also turn up the heat, but do not  set fire to the house." So said Justice Breyer in dissent in Ziglar v. Abbasi, in which the Court rejected Bivens claims against high-level executive officials brought by mistreated post-9/11 detainees (although left a small glimmer of hope for a claim against the warden), and in the process may have limited Bivens to claims against line officers for immediate violations of a small group of rights. In other words, the majority may have set fire to the House of Bivens.

 Some thoughts after the jump.

1) This was a 4-2 decision, with Justice Kennedy writing for a majority of the Chief, Thomas, and Alito, and Justice Breyer dissenting with Justice Ginsburg. Justice Sotomayor recused because she was on the  Second Circuit when earlier iterations of this case were heard, Justice Kagan recused (because she was SG when earlier iterations of the case arose), and Justice Gorsuch did not participate (he was not on the Court). It remains to be seen how much weight a decision from such a small Court will gain. Everyone likely assumes that the judgment would have been the same with a full Court, with Gorsuch joining the majority and Sotomayor and Kagan joining the dissent.

2) Two themes have been floating around the recent Bivens cases. One is the idea of "extending" Bivens to new contexts beyond the three cases in which SCOTUS recognized a claim and how the Court should hesitate to do so. The other is the connection between Bivens and implied statutory rights of action and the Thomas/Scalia position that Bivens was a "relic of the heady days in which this Court assumed common-law powers to create causes of action. Both ideas came home to roost today.

3) As for the second theme, Justice Kennedy timed the creation of Bivens to the rise of the implied right of action doctrine, noting that Justice Harlan relied on those cases in identifying an implied constitutional claim. It followed that the Court's narrowing of implied statutory rights makes "expanding" Bivens a "disfavored" activity. Both rest on separation-of-powers principles under which Congress, not the courts, should decide whether a damages remedy exists. If the Court is not implying rights of action, then it should not recognize "new" Bivens claims.

4) As for the first theme, this led the Court to crystalize a three-part test for whether a Bivens claim is available (both the majority and dissent agree on this test):

   a) If the case is different in a "meaningful way" from previous cases decided by SCOTUS, then the context is new. Factors that suggest meaningful differences include the rank of the officers, the constitutional rights involved, the generality or specificity of the right involved, the extent of judicial guidance of how the officer should respond, the statute under which the officer operated, the risk of disruption of other branches, or the presence of new special factors not considered in past cases. As to the high-level executive officers, this was a new context, involving high-level policy following a terrorist attack; as to the warden, this case involved a new right (Fifth Amendment rather than Eighth), less guidance as to constitutional obligations, and congressional action suggesting intent not to provide a remedy--all small differences, but "even a modest extension is still an extension."

   b) There is consideration of alternative remedies, although it is unclear how. The majority several times emphasized the availability of alternative remedies for the constitutional violations here, namely habeas and injunctive relief. Breyer treated this as its own second step. [Update: I will link to Steve's post at Just Security pointing out that habeas likely is not available to challenge conditions (as opposed to fact) of confinement and Kennedy himself hedged on whether habeas was available in this kind of case]

   c) Special factors counseling hesitation. Here, these include the national-security context, that this case entails challenges to and inquiry into federal policy discussions and decisions, that the claims go beyond ordinary law enforcement, that Congress has done nothing in its post-9/11 litigation to provide any remedies for detainees challenging their mistreatment, and that injunctive and habeas remedies are available (again, it is not clear where this belongs in the analysis). To the extent there is a balance to be struck between these special factors and the needs for deterrence of executive misconduct, it is for Congress to strike that balance. The Court did remand for the Second Circuit to do the special factors analysis as to the warden.

5) Justice Breyer was explicit that the above is the three-step test, but he saw the factors going the other way. He did not see this as a new context, or, if it was, the claim survived steps two and three.

6) Breyer calls the majority on what I believe has been a problem in the recent Bivens cases: the confounding of the constitutional merits, qualified immunity, and cause of action. Breyer works through the list of factors that the majority identifies for defining when a context is new, insisting that some go to whether a constitutional right was violated, some go to whether that right was clearly established so the officer enjoys qualified immunity, and some are better case as special factors for step three. But none should go to the cause of action. The majority makes this worse with its consideration of alternative remedies, which hangs around the analysis throughout the case, not belonging in any clear place. The majority seems to be in a hurry to get rid of cases such as this, but it does so by focusing so much on the cause of action rather than the substantive merits and substantive defenses. Or consider how the majority uses national security as a special factor counseling hesitation before recognizing the cause of action. That factor can be taken into account at other points--in pleading requirements, on the merits, in assessing immunity, and in shaping discovery. Given these existing safeguards, there is no need to double-count it at the threshold--that is setting the house on fire.

7) That last point gives rise to another problem Breyer addresses: The "anomaly" of different analysis for claims against state/local officers as opposed to federal officers (we might also call this a lack of parallelism between claims against the former compared with the latter). A plaintiff can pursue a § 1983 claim against a mayor or governor but not a Bivens claim against a high-level DOJ official, for the same conduct violating the same right. And even if claims fail, they fail for different reasons: The claim against the federal officer fails because there is no cause of action, while the claim against the state/local official fails because the right was not violated or because it was not clearly established. That distinction makes no sense.

8) Breyer closes his opinion with a point he made during argument about the special need for damages actions in the national-security context. Damages claims can be resolved after the emergency has passed, with more information about the situation and a cooler eye towards the facts. And courts may be less likely to to issue injunctive or habeas relief in the middle of an emergency. It therefore makes no sense to rely on those remedies to preclude the later damages remedy--damages play a special role, with courts able to consider after passions have died down. The majority's approach reflects the general favoritism towards injunctive rather than damages relief in the constitutional context.

9) Justice Breyer cites Jim Pfander's new book on Bivens and GWOT, at one point seeming to adopt Jim's view that Congress' decision not to immunize individual officers under the FTCA for constitutional violations reflects an intent to leave Bivens in tact as the means for remedying constitutional violations, while putting non-constitutional torts through the FTCA.

10) Steve Vladeck had a Twitter thread on this case, pointing out that Hernandez v. Mesa, another Bivens case, remains undecided and could pull back on some of what the majority did here. But he suspects if that were to happen, the opinions would have issued at the same time. I wonder if Hernandez will be resolved on qualified-immunity rather than Bivens grounds.

11) As I said in my earlier post, I now have to rewrite my Bivens chapter. Oh well.

Thanks for wading through a long post.

Thanks for sitting through a long post.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on June 19, 2017 at 03:04 PM in 2018 End of Term, Civil Procedure, Constitutional thoughts, Howard Wasserman, Law and Politics | Permalink

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