This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 30, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court will examine more than a dozen cases that challenge the court invented doctrine of qualified immunity

which serves largely to protect corrupt abusive cops from the consequences of violating

Americans rights.

Cato's Jay Schweikert has looked over the cases.

He's cautiously optimistic the court will take a case challenging qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity is an important issue to you, to our criminal justice scholars at the Cato Institute, up until now what has been the thing that has kept it off of the docket at the US Supreme Court?

Well, you know, it's hard to say for sure. I mean, this is, in a lot of of ways I think this has been a bit of a

sleeper issue and qualified immunity has been around in its present form

since the early 1980s and it's obviously been something that civil rights

attorneys have been very aware of and been confronting on a regular basis

since then. But it's really only been in the last, I think, you know, three or four years that there's been this, in my view, sort of developing consensus that not only is have doctrine practically problematic in terms of the regular

injustices that it permits, but that it also really doesn't lack any

that it doesn't have any strong legal basis. The Supreme Court in recent years has sort of put forward

this defense of the doctrine is somehow rooted in 18th century and 19th century common law because the court of

course is recognized that the text of section 1983 our main federal

civil rights statute doesn't say anything about immunity.

And so the way the court has defended this doctrine is,

well, this just incorporated, you know, existing rules at common law.

And I think it really was this scholarship of Will Bode in a very

influential 2018 piece called is qualified immunity unlawful, you know really dug

...