754
Thomas, J., dissenting
be on notice that their conduct violates established law even in novel factual circumstances." Ante, at 741.
Although the Court argues that the Court of Appeals has improperly imposed a "rigid gloss on the qualified immunity standard," ante, at 739, and n. 9, requiring that the facts of a previous case be materially similar to a plaintiff's circumstances for qualified immunity to be overcome, this suggestion is plainly wrong. Rather, this Court of Appeals has repeatedly made clear that it imposes no such requirement on plaintiffs seeking to defeat an assertion of qualified immunity. See, e. g., Priester v. Riviera Beach, 208 F. 3d 919, 926 (CA11 2000) (stating that qualified immunity does not apply if an official's conduct "was so far beyond the hazy border between excessive and acceptable force that [the official] had to know he was violating the Constitution even without case-law on point" (internal quotation marks omitted)); Smith v. Mattox, 127 F. 3d 1416, 1419 (CA11 1997) (noting that a plaintiff can overcome an assertion of qualified immunity by demonstrating "that the official's conduct lies so obviously at the very core of what the [Constitution] prohibits that the unlawfulness of the conduct was readily apparent to the official, notwithstanding the lack of caselaw"); Lassiter v. Alabama A&M Univ., 28 F. 3d 1146, 1150, n. 4 (CA11 1994) ("[O]ccasionally the words of a federal statute or federal constitutional provision will be specific enough to establish the law applicable to particular circumstances clearly and to overcome qualified immunity even in the absence of case law").
Similarly, it is unfair to read the Court of Appeals' decision as adopting such a "rigid gloss" here. Nowhere did the Court of Appeals state that petitioner, in order to overcome respondents' assertion of qualified immunity, was required to produce precedent addressing "materially similar" facts. Rather, the Court of Appeals merely (and sensibly) evaluated the cases relied upon by petitioner to determine whether they involved facts "materially similar" to those
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