Professor Earns National Legal Writing Grant for Her Research on Qualified Immunity
Sarah E. Ricks, distinguished clinical professor of law, earned a nationally competitive grant to further her legal research, which will appear in the UCLA Law Review next year.
Ricks’s research won the Legal Writing Scholarship Grant, co-sponsored by the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD), Legal Writing Institute (LWI), and LexisNexis, a data and analytics company. Open to educators, the grant honors scholarship that advances legal research and communication. The number of awardees varies annually; Ricks was the sole scholar to receive the grant this year.
Ricks’s article is titled “Suppressing Constitutional Law: Qualified Immunity and Non-precedential Opinions.” Federal appellate courts label most opinions as “non-precedent.” The label is supposed to have no doctrinal impact. But in the context of qualified immunity, the article shows, the non-precedential label dramatically impacts doctrine. Qualified immunity was designed to protect government workers from being liable for violating constitutional rights unless the right was “clearly established.”
“Qualified immunity has become too high a hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs,” said Ricks, noting that plaintiffs must source earlier cases with nearly identical facts. However, federal appellate courts label most decisions “non-precedent,” limiting the pool of examples to establish constitutional rights. Ricks’s research notes 20% of non-precedential opinions announce a new constitutional right. For qualified immunity, labeling opinions “non-precedent” increases the likelihood defendants will be immune.
Ricks proposes reforms for both qualified immunity and appellate court procedure. “My proposal is to come up with a way to curtail qualified immunity and increase accountability for government bad actors,” she said. “Government accountability benefits everybody. I think holding wrongdoers accountable benefits the public and brings clarity to constitutional law.”
“The UCLA Law Review is honored to publish Professor Ricks’s timely and incisive examination of a critically underexplored dimension of judicial decision-making,” said Editor-In-Chief Malia Smith. “Her article sheds new light on how the widespread use of non-precedential opinions in federal appellate courts undermines the development of constitutional law and compounds the barriers plaintiffs face under qualified immunity doctrine. By blending rigorous doctrinal analysis with practical reform proposals, Professor Ricks offers a vital contribution to the ongoing effort to vindicate constitutional protections.”
Ricks is the author of Current Issues in Constitutional Litigation: A Context and Practice Casebook (4th Ed. forthcoming). Since 2008, she has served as a Philadelphia Mayoral appointee on the city’s antidiscrimination agency and, since 2009, in the American Law Institute. After graduating from Yale Law School, clerking for a federal trial court, and practicing for 11 years, she joined Rutgers in 2001.
