594
Opinion of the Court
cerns underlying Harlow do not support Justice Scalia's unprecedented proposal to immunize all officials whose conduct is "objectively valid," regardless of improper intent, see post, at 612 (dissenting opinion).
III
In fashioning a special rule for constitutional claims that require proof of improper intent, the judges of the Court of Appeals relied almost entirely on our opinion in Harlow, and on the specific policy concerns that we identified in that opinion. As we have explained, neither that case nor those concerns warrant the wholesale change in the law that they have espoused. Without such precedential grounding, for the courts of appeals or this Court to change the burden of proof for an entire category of claims would stray far from the traditional limits on judicial authority.
Neither the text of § 1983 or any other federal statute, nor the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, provide any support for imposing the clear and convincing burden of proof on plaintiffs either at the summary judgment stage or in the trial itself. The same might be said of the qualified immunity defense; but in Harlow, as in the series of earlier cases concerning both the absolute and the qualified immunity defenses, we were engaged in a process of adjudication that we had consistently and repeatedly viewed as appropriate for judicial decision—a process "predicated upon a considered inquiry into the immunity historically accorded the relevant official at common law and the interests behind it." Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U. S. 409, 421 (1976); see also Butz, 438 U. S., at 503-504; Wyatt v. Cole, 504 U. S. 158, 170-172 (1992) (Kennedy, J., concurring).15 The unprecedented change
15 Though our opinion in Harlow was forthright in revising the immunity defense for policy reasons, see Anderson, 483 U. S., at 645, that decision nonetheless followed recent Court precedent and simply eliminated one aspect of the established doctrine; it did not create a new immunity standard out of whole cloth.
Page: Index Previous 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007