Cite as: 527 U. S. 423 (1999)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
agents, they were on their way to report to their superior about a freshly discovered illegal still when they came upon a mortally wounded man in the road. Had they not been en route to their superior, the agents argued, they would never have made the discovery that required them to testify before the coroner. We rejected the argument that this established a sufficient connection between their official duty and the obstruction-of-justice prosecution. Although reporting to their superior was certainly among their official duties, the act of testifying before the coroner was not, and it was the latter act "on account of" which (or in the terms of the current removal statute, "for" which) they were prosecuted. Id., at 42. So also here, it is not enough that respondents' performance of their judicial duties was a link in the chain of events that brought about these suits—that had they not performed their official duties, the fee would not have been assessed, and had the fee not been assessed they would not have been sued for failure to pay it. Acker and Clemon were sued for their refusal to pay the tax—and that, as I have said, is not an act required by, or even performed in connection with, cf. Willingham v. Morgan, 395 U. S. 402 (1969), the duties of their judicial office.
None of this is to suggest, of course, that removal is justified only when the federal officer can prove that the act prompting suit is, beyond doubt, an official one. If that were the case, the merits truly would be subsumed within the jurisdictional question of removal; the defense of qualified immunity, for example, would always be resolved as a threshold jurisdictional question—an odd result when the main point of 28 U. S. C. § 1443 is to give officers a federal forum in which to litigate the merits of immunity defenses. See Willingham v. Morgan, supra, at 407. The point is only that the officer should have to identify as the gravamen of the suit an act that was, if not required by, at least closely connected with, the performance of his official functions. 28
447
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