Rights & Society
Should qualified immunity for police be eliminated?
Accountability vs. paralyzing liability.
ANALYSISApril 13, 2026
The debate over qualified immunity — a judge-made legal doctrine shielding government officials from civil liability for constitutional violations — is active in both the 119th Congress and state legislatures in 2025-2026. Two competing federal bills have been introduced: one by Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) to codify and preserve the doctrine, and another by Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) to eliminate it entirely. With federal reform stalled in a Republican-controlled Congress, states have become the primary battleground for change.
When a cop makes a split-second call that turns out to be wrong, should they face personal financial ruin in court — or does that threat make every officer hesitate at the moment that hesitation gets people killed? The fight over qualified immunity is really a fight over whether accountability and effective policing can coexist.
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Doctrine's textual and historical legitimacy
Conservative
Qualified immunity does not appear in the Constitution, and it does not appear in 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — the 1871 statute it supposedly interprets. The Supreme Court invented it wholesale in Harlow v. Fitzgerald in 1982. Conservatives who support it are defending judicial legislation, which is precisely what we have spent decades opposing when liberals do it.
Liberal
We agree entirely on the text: Section 1983 was written by a Republican Reconstruction Congress to hold state actors accountable for constitutional violations, and they included no immunity clause because they wanted none. What's worth adding is that the self-contradiction runs deeper — conservatives who invoke originalism to constrain progressive rulings cannot logically exempt a doctrine the Court built on top of a statute Congress wrote to do the opposite.
Conservative
The agreement here is real, which is why the debate should move past 'is it textualist' — it isn't, and we both know it — to the harder question of what a conservative replacement looks like, rather than treating abolition as the only alternative to the status quo.
Liberal
A replacement is worth designing, but the urgency matters: Pearson v. Callahan already lets judges dismiss claims without ruling on the underlying violation, which means every year without reform is another year the self-sealing loop runs and precedent never gets made.
Officer financial ruin argument
Conservative
The core argument for qualified immunity — that without it, officers face personal bankruptcy from litigation — collapses on contact with data. Across 81 jurisdictions over six years, officers were personally responsible for 0.02% of misconduct settlement dollars. Governments absorb the costs, which means taxpayers currently pay for constitutional violations while the officers who committed them face no financial consequence at all.
Liberal
That 0.02% figure is the number that should end the bankruptcy panic, and it's striking that pro-immunity advocates haven't seriously engaged it. What it reveals is that the doctrine's practical function isn't protecting individual officers from ruin — it's insulating violations from judicial scrutiny entirely, since cases are dismissed before any merits determination occurs.
Conservative
Exactly — and that reframing matters, because once you admit the financial argument is fiction, the only remaining defense of qualified immunity is that courts need a tool to dispose of weak claims quickly, which is a case-management argument, not a constitutional one.
Liberal
Case management can be handled through existing procedural tools; using a judicially invented immunity doctrine to do it just happens to also kill meritorious claims, which is a steep price for docket efficiency.
State abolition experiments as evidence
Conservative
Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico have eliminated qualified immunity in state court. No fiscal crisis followed in any of those police departments. No wave of frivolous suits overwhelmed those judiciaries. When conservatives argue correctly that states are laboratories of democracy, this is what the laboratory is reporting: the catastrophe does not materialize.
Liberal
The state evidence is genuinely encouraging, but there's an honest limitation worth naming: none of those four states contain a New York City or a Chicago. A critic can fairly argue that the absence of catastrophe in Montana isn't decisive evidence about what happens at scale in a department handling millions of interactions annually in a politically charged environment.
Conservative
The scale objection cuts both ways — New York and Chicago already absorb hundreds of millions in misconduct settlements under the current system, so the question isn't whether large cities are untested under abolition, it's whether the current doctrine is actually protecting them from fiscal strain or just shifting costs to taxpayers.
Liberal
That's a fair reframe, and it points to the deeper problem: the state experiments are valuable but they're also limited to state court, since federal qualified immunity doctrine still governs Section 1983 claims, which means the most consequential reform remains federal and is currently politically dead.
The precedent loop blocking new claims
Conservative
Pearson v. Callahan in 2009 gave judges license to dismiss civil rights claims on immunity grounds without first ruling whether a constitutional violation occurred. That created a trap: no precedent because immunity was granted, immunity granted because no precedent exists. It is a self-sealing system, and it was not designed — it was constructed by the Court on top of a statute written to do the opposite.
Liberal
The loop you're describing is the most underappreciated structural problem in this debate. It means qualified immunity doesn't just block individual plaintiffs — it permanently suppresses the development of constitutional law, because the cases that would establish 'clearly established' rights never reach a merits ruling. The doctrine is self-perpetuating in a way that compounds over time.
Conservative
And that compounding is why the 'clearly established law' standard is the specific mechanism that needs replacing — not with limitless liability, but with a genuine good-faith defense that juries evaluate on the facts, which would let constitutional doctrine actually develop.
Liberal
The jury solution is worth taking seriously, but moving discretion from judges to juries doesn't eliminate inconsistency — it relocates it, and high-profile cases can distort jury evaluation in both directions just as judicial politics can distort what counts as 'clearly established.'
Good-faith defense as conservative alternative
Conservative
The conservative reform isn't codifying qualified immunity into statute and calling it originalism — it's restoring the plain meaning of Section 1983, removing the 'clearly established law' standard, and replacing it with a good-faith defense that juries evaluate case by case. That preserves officer protection for genuinely ambiguous situations without insulating deliberate violations from accountability.
Liberal
The good-faith jury standard is a genuine improvement over the current judicial veto, but the honest worry is consistency: juries in politically charged cases have shown they can acquit in ways that defy the facts or convict based on atmosphere rather than law. You're proposing to replace unpredictable judges with unpredictable juries, and it's not obvious which institution holds more reliable discretion over constitutional accountability.
Conservative
Trading unpredictable judges for unpredictable juries isn't a stability argument — it's a preference for which institution holds unreviewable discretion, and juries at least face the actual facts of the case rather than the abstract question of whether a prior ruling was sufficiently on-point.
Liberal
That's a real advantage of the jury model, and it might be the best available option — the deeper problem is that any reform short of federal legislation leaves Section 1983 operating under Supreme Court doctrine that five justices can quietly expand again the moment political conditions change.
Conservative's hardest question
The legitimate worry that eliminating the 'clearly established law' standard would expose officers to liability for split-second decisions in genuinely novel situations — where no precedent exists — is not fully answered by settlement data alone. A good-faith defense evaluated by juries is the conservative alternative, but whether juries in politically charged cases would apply it consistently is an honest uncertainty that reform advocates have not fully resolved.
Liberal's hardest question
The strongest challenge to the abolitionist position is that the state-level evidence, while encouraging, is still limited to four states over four years, and none of them are among the largest or most complex urban police environments in the country. A critic could fairly argue that New York City or Chicago under a full qualified immunity ban represents an empirically untested situation, and that the absence of catastrophe in Montana is not decisive evidence about what happens at scale.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides agree that qualified immunity has no textual basis in the Constitution or in 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and that it was created by the Supreme Court rather than by Congress.
The real conflict
The sides disagree on a factual-predictive question: whether the absence of catastrophe in four small-to-midsize states over four years constitutes meaningful evidence about what would happen to large, high-volume urban police departments under full abolition.
What nobody has answered
If governments — not officers — absorb nearly all misconduct costs under the current system, and governments would also absorb most litigation costs under abolition, then who exactly is the doctrine protecting, and is that protection something a democratic legislature ever actually authorized?
Sources
- Search results: 'qualified immunity 2025 legislation Congress bills'
- Search results: 'qualified immunity state laws Colorado Montana Nevada New Mexico'
- Search results: 'Jim Banks Qualified Immunity Act 2025'
- Search results: 'Ayanna Pressley Ed Markey Ending Qualified Immunity Act'
- Search results: 'Supreme Court qualified immunity 2025 decline to hear'
- Search results: 'Cato Institute poll qualified immunity public opinion'
- Search results: 'police officer personal liability misconduct settlements research'
- Search results: 'qualified immunity history Harlow v Fitzgerald 1871 statute'