288
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
imposing on trial courts the unenviable burden of reconciling well-established jurisprudence under the Fourth and Eighth Amendments with the ill-defined contours of some novel due process right.1
This rule of reserving due process for otherwise homeless substantial claims no doubt informs those decisions, see Graham v. Connor, 490 U. S. 386 (1989), Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103 (1975), and Whitley v. Albers, 475 U. S. 312, 327 (1986), in which the Court has resisted relying on the Due Process Clause when doing so would have duplicated protection that a more specific constitutional provision already bestowed.2 This case calls for just such restraint, in present-1 Justice Stevens suggests that these concerns are not for this Court, since Congress resolved them in deciding to provide a remedy for constitutional violations under § 1983. Post, at 312. The question before the Court, however, is not about the existence of a statutory remedy for an admitted constitutional violation, but whether a particular violation of substantive due process, as distinct from the Fourth Amendment, should be recognized on the facts pleaded. This question is indisputably within the province of the Court, and should be addressed with regard for the concerns about unnecessary duplication in constitutional adjudication reflected in Graham v. Connor, 490 U. S. 386 (1989), Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103 (1975), and Whitley v. Albers, 475 U. S. 312 (1986). Nothing in Congress's enactment of § 1983 suggests otherwise.
2 Recognizing these concerns makes sense of what at first blush may seem a tension between our decisions in Graham v. Connor, supra, and Gerstein v. Pugh, supra, on the one hand, and United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, ante, p. 43, and Soldal v. Cook County, 506 U. S. 56 (1992), on the other. The Court held in Graham that all claims of excessive force by law enforcement officials in the course of a "seizure" should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment's "reasonableness" standard. "Because the Fourth Amendment provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection against this sort of physically intrusive governmental conduct, that Amendment, not the more generalized notion of 'substantive due process,' must be the guide for analyzing these claims." Graham v. Connor, supra, at 395. The Gerstein Court held that the Fourth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause, determines what post-arrest proceedings are required for suspects detained on criminal charges. Gerstein v. Pugh, supra. As we recently explained in United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, ante, at 50, the Court reasoned in
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