This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 2, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The doctrine of qualified immunity protects police officers from the legal consequences of sometimes

egregious violations of American's

basic liberties. And yet the doctrine isn't exactly written down, and courts,

especially the Supreme Court, are loath to take a case that puts that doctrine to any serious scrutiny.

William Baud is an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School.

We talked about qualified immunity and its legal defenses earlier this week.

What is written down, there's a federal civil rights statute that says that if the state violates

your constitutional rights, you know, you have a right to sue them and they can be held liable for what they've done.

That's all the statute, that's all the law actually says, but the courts have invented a

defense, invented the qualified immunity defense, and attached it to the statute.

Okay, so what statute are we talking about?

So the statute is called,

by its number, 42 U.S.C. section 1983 1983 but what it is is it's a civil rights statute

that was adopted by Congress right after the Civil War to make sure that there was a

remedy when states violated people civil rights which they do all the time.

All right, so how has it worked out?

How has this remedy functioned?

So the remedy has not been as effective as Congress might have hoped or wanted it to be.

Because so that when people do get to bring lawsuits under this under this statute and the courts have recognized you know that it is indeed a vehicle for

for holding police officers or other state agents accountable

But the courts have also then added to it these

...