This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 12, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

This week the Supreme Court will consider if they'll take any of more than a dozen cases

unqualified immunity. That's the court invented doctrine that allows

police and other government agents to avoid accountability after they violated

Americans rights. Just last week the news service Reuters examined cases involving qualified

immunity claims, Cato's Clark Neely and J Schweikert comment.

What's the probability that you assign to the likelihood that the

court ultimately does in in these cases take take one of them and and try to decide this question.

It's about 50% Jay and I both agree that it's probably about

50%. It's of course the odds of a cert grant in any one case are always very

long but there's a lot of unusual things that I'll let Jay elaborate on that have been going on with the court's qualified immunity docket this term, and there's good reason to believe that the odds of a grant in one of the 13 cases that are going to conference on May 15th are higher than usual.

Yeah, and I think the reason I feel more confident about a cert grant here than I normally

would even on an issue like this is because of the way the Supreme Court has been scheduling some of these

cert petitions. Several of these petitions have been fully briefed and ready for resolution

since last October,

but the Supreme Court has repeatedly rescheduled them

and is, so the timing here is no coincidence.

They have made a purposeful decision

to put all of their qualified immunity cases on the docket for the same day for the same conference,

which suggests they're looking very closely at this underlying question of whether qualified

immunity itself should be reconsidered.

And there's really no reason they would need to do that

...