Cite as: 515 U. S. 304 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
Second, petitioners add, if appellate courts try to separate an appealed order's reviewable determination (that a given set of facts violates clearly established law) from its unre-viewable determination (that an issue of fact is "genuine"), they will have great difficulty doing so. District judges may simply deny summary judgment motions without indicating their reasons for doing so. How, in such a case, will the court of appeals know what set of facts to assume when it answers the purely legal question about "clearly established" law?
This problem is more serious, but not serious enough to lead us to a different conclusion. When faced with an argument that the district court mistakenly identified clearly established law, the court of appeals can simply take, as given, the facts that the district court assumed when it denied summary judgment for that (purely legal) reason. Knowing that this is "extremely helpful to a reviewing court," Anderson, 477 U. S., at 250, n. 6, district courts presumably will often state those facts. But, if they do not, we concede that a court of appeals may have to undertake a cumbersome review of the record to determine what facts the district court, in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party, likely assumed. Regardless, this circumstance does not make a critical difference to our result, for a rule that occasionally requires a detailed evidence-based review of the record is still, from a practical point of view, more manageable than the rule that petitioners urge us to adopt. Petitioners' approach would make that task, not the exception, but the rule. We note, too, that our holding here has been the law in several Circuits for some time. See supra, at 308-309. Yet, petitioners have not pointed to concrete examples of the unmanageability they fear.
III
For these reasons, we hold that a defendant, entitled to invoke a qualified immunity defense, may not appeal a dis-
319
Page: Index Previous 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007