Appellate Law

Odds and Ends

By S. COTUS

• The other side of qualified immunity.  Usually after I read a 1983 case on qualified immunity which ends in a determination that the defendant (usually a cop, sometimes a state official) is entitled to qualified immunity, there is a great celebration amongst whoever beat someone up!  ?Huzzah!?  They exclaim!  ?We don?t have to pay damages, because the court said that the law was ambiguous.  We will continue to beat people up and/or tear down their posters.  All we need to do is plead ignorance and ambiguity, and we will win!? But, what cops (and university administrators) don?t understand, is that qualified immunity doesn?t apply to injunctive relief.  And, according to Wait A Second, at least one District Court judge has granted an injunction to a student facing a disciplinary hearing that sought to be represented by counsel when he was also facing criminal charges.  No amount of whining about how the statute was ambiguous (and, in fact, there was no appellate authority) can save the school, who is now on the hook for attorneys fees under 1988. 
• Timing and AEDPA. Scott Dodson, of the University of Arkansas writes a swell article on how the Supreme Court screwed up Bowles v. Russell. Luckily, according to him, they screwed it up so bad, that nothing is too certain, and convincing arguments are to be made regarding the nature of any statute of limitation.
• The US Attorneys Office has a press release that reads "Former First Circuit Employee Arrested For Distributing Oxycontin Pills."

Intermission -- Below the Fold

Full post as published by Appellate Law and Practice on March 18, 2008 (boomark / email).