Cite as: 523 U. S. 574 (1998)
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
rule was designed to prevent.1 Such a rule would also allow plaintiffs to strip defendants of Harlow's protections by a simple act of pleading—any minimally competent attorney (or pro se litigant) can convert any adverse decision into a motive-based tort, and thereby subject government officials to some measure of intrusion into their subjective worlds.
Such a result is quite inconsistent with the logic and underlying principles of Harlow.2 In order to preserve the protections that Harlow conferred, it is necessary to construct a qualified immunity test in this context that is also based exclusively on objective factors, and prevents plaintiffs from engaging in "peculiarly disruptive" subjective investigations until after the immunity inquiry has been resolved in their favor. The test I propose accomplishes this goal. Under this test, when a plaintiff alleges that an official's action was taken with an unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful motive, the defendant will be entitled to immunity and immediate dismissal of the suit if he can offer a lawful reason for his action and the plaintiff cannot establish, through objective evidence, that the offered reason is actually a pretext.
1 The Court suggests that the Wood v. Strickland subjective inquiry that we stripped from the qualified immunity analysis in Harlow is somehow different from the inquiry into subjective intent involved in resolution of a motive-based tort claim. Ante, at 592. While the inquiries may differ somewhat in terms of what precisely is being asked, this difference is without relevance for the purposes of qualified immunity doctrine. Both inquiries allow a plaintiff to probe the official's state of mind, and therefore both types of inquiry have the potential to be "peculiarly disruptive" to effective government.
2 This result also threatens to "Balkanize" the rule of qualified immunity. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U. S. 635, 646, 643 (1987) ("[W]e have been unwilling to complicate qualified immunity analysis by making the scope or extent of immunity turn on the precise nature of various officials' duties or the precise character of the particular rights alleged to have been violated. An immunity that has as many variants as there are modes of official action and types of rights would not give conscientious officials that assurance of protection that it is the object of the doctrine to provide").
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