Dan Epps

And in this case, it's merely— In this case, there was a brief warning, right?

That changes everything.

Okay.

And so, as you can imagine from the way this qualified immunity rule—

is being enforced by the court, it makes it very, very hard to sue.

Even when someone's constitutional rights are violated, that's not enough.

You have to show that they were violated and that there was a previous opinion that had said like something close to that exact thing happened and that it was a constitutional violation.

Okay.

So we have here a dissent from Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson, that digs into the substance of the decision.

And she takes issue, you know, with the court's conclusion that the, you know, violation here was not clearly established.

And then she also returns to a theme at the end, which is the theme that we were mentioning a second ago, which is that the court—

chooses to intervene in a very lopsided, asymmetrical fashion.

And I think that criticism lands, right?

And we get no explanation, right?

I mean, even though we have a short opinion by the Supreme Court granting relief in the case from Vermont, they explain why the lower court decision is wrong, but they don't say, and by the way, here's why we decided to step in.

Dan, the Supreme Court is not a court of error correction.

Except when it is.

Yes.

Right?

When they choose to be.