Best of Cato Daily Podcast: Why Do Rights-Violating University Officials Get Qualified Immunity?
Cato Daily Podcast
Cato Institute
4.6 • 949 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Caleb O. Brown hosted the Cato Daily Podcast for nearly 18 years, producing well over 4000 episodes. He has gone on to head Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute. This is one among the best episodes produced in his tenure, selected by the host and listeners.
What happens when public university officials violate your free speech rights? Often, they get qualified immunity, thus shielding them from the consequences of those actions. Casey Mattox with Americans for Prosperity comments.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years, |
| 0:05.7 | I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you, |
| 0:10.9 | have selected some favorites. I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark |
| 0:16.3 | the desire to defend liberty. Thank you for listening. |
| 0:28.3 | This is the Cato Dealey podcast for Friday, September 15th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown. When police violate your rights is often difficult to hold them accountable because of a judicial |
| 0:31.9 | doctrine known as qualified immunity. But what about when a public university official |
| 0:37.0 | violates your free speech rights? Even in those |
| 0:40.4 | cases, even when the violation of rights is not in dispute, qualified immunity regularly protects |
| 0:46.0 | those officials from consequences as well. Casey Maddox is a vice president and Americans for |
| 0:51.3 | Prosperity. We spoke last month in Chicago. Almost the entirety |
| 0:55.6 | of the focus on qualified immunity has been on police. That's appropriate to a point because |
| 1:02.3 | police are the people we give guns to and ask them to have often profoundly negative |
| 1:08.3 | interactions with the broader public. |
| 1:14.8 | And so one of the issues that has been raised pretty recently, |
| 1:20.5 | I spoke with Chris Kemet from the NAACP, an attorney there who is representing a young woman who had been stripped searched multiple times by her high school's administrators looking for pot. |
| 1:38.3 | And that obviously, if there's one thing, everybody can pretty much agree on is that that is something that |
| 1:46.5 | should not occur and that young people, to the extent that they are entitled to agency and the |
| 1:53.9 | protection of law, that is something that should not be allowed to occur. And so it's raised the issue, at least in my mind, that maybe if you want to go |
| 2:04.5 | at this qualified immunity thing, there are a whole host of other public officials who should |
| 2:09.8 | not be entitled to it, who nonetheless are. No, that's exactly right. And so, you know, |
| 2:15.1 | just a little bit of background for me, I think I've sued universities, public universities at about 35 states, or more accurately, public university officials. |
| 2:25.3 | Because one of the realities with these, especially free speech violations by university officials, is that generally speaking, you can't sue the |
... |
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