On October 22, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s faculty co-directors, Miriam Seifter and Rob Yablon, filed an amicus brief with nine other legal scholars in Quiñonez v. United States, a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The appeal concerns whether a federal statute, the Westfall Act, precludes all state-law damages actions against federal officials, even those based on federal constitutional violations. Here, the plaintiffs seek to use California’s Tom Bane Civil Rights Act to sue federal employees who they alleged violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights.
The brief argues that the Westfall Act’s exception for actions “brought for a violation of the Constitution of the United States” allows the plaintiffs to pursue their Bane Act claims. As the brief explains, the Constitution’s structure envisions an active role for state laws and institutions in redressing the constitutional violations of federal actors, and, historically, state-level causes of action were the primary way for individuals to recover for injuries caused by such actors. These federalism principles and traditions should inform the court’s analysis of the statute: If Congress seeks to alter the balance of state and federal power, it is expected to speak clearly, and the Westfall Act simply contains no clear indication that Congress meant to deprive states of their ability to provide recourse against federal officers who act unconstitutionally.
A recent SDRI publication explores how state-law causes of action, like California’s statute, may offer untapped potential for remedying violations of constitutional rights by federal officials.
The other legal scholars who joined the brief are Vikram David Amar (UC Davis School of Law), Jessica Bulman-Pozen (Columbia Law School), Barry Friedman (New York University School of Law), Aziz Huq (University of Chicago Law School), Gillian Metzger (Columbia Law School), Alexander A. Reinert (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law), Joanna C. Schwartz (UCLA School of Law), Carolyn Shapiro (Chicago-Kent College of Law), and Fred O. Smith, Jr. (Stanford Law School).