166
Opinion of the Court
should not suffice to subject government officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery." Id., at 817-818. Accordingly, we held that government officials performing discretionary functions are shielded from "liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct [did] not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Id., at 818. This wholly objective standard, we concluded, would "avoid excessive disruption of government and permit the resolution of many insubstantial claims on summary judgment." Ibid.
That Harlow "completely reformulated qualified immunity along principles not at all embodied in the common law," Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U. S. 635, 645 (1987), was reinforced by our decision in Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U. S. 511 (1985). Mitchell held that Harlow established an "immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability," which, like an absolute immunity, "is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial." 472 U. S., at 526 (emphasis supplied). Thus, we held in Mitchell that the denial of qualified immunity should be immediately appealable. Id., at 530.
It is this type of objectively determined, immediately appealable immunity that respondents asserted below.2 But,
2 In arguing that respondents are entitled to qualified immunity under Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S. 800 (1982), the dissent mixes apples and oranges. Even if we were to agree with the dissent's proposition that elements a plaintiff was required to prove as part of her case in chief could somehow be construed as a " 'defense,' " post, at 176, n. 1, and that this "defense" entitles private citizens to some protection from liability, we cannot agree that respondents are entitled to immunity from suit under Harlow. One could reasonably infer from the fact that a plaintiff's malicious prosecution or abuse of process action failed if she could not affirmatively establish both malice and want of probable cause that plaintiffs bringing an analogous suit under § 1983 should be required to make a similar showing to sustain a § 1983 cause of action. Alternatively, if one accepts the dissent's characterization of the common law as establishing an affirmative "defense" for private defendants, then one could also conclude that private parties sued under § 1983 should likewise be entitled to
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