Dan Epps

And then here in the other case, in the Villarreal case, there's no explanation from the court at all.

The court just denies certiorari.

The court gets, you know, 7,000 or 8,000 petitions every year from people saying, please hear my case.

Most of them are denied without an opinion.

And so, you know, there's been a lot of criticism, you know, from you and others about the court's

refusal to explain how it is using its discretionary authority.

And when you first kind of wrote the original Shadow Docket article, I think you were actually talking about cases like this, right?

That was a prominent subject of that article about cases where the court was stepping in and these qualified immunity cases

very fact-bound disputes, because the court, you know, usually says, we don't mess around with fact-bound disputes that affect just a single person.

We're here for the really big legal issues, and yet sometimes they don't do that.

Yeah.

Let's talk about qualified immunity for a second.

You're a prominent critic of qualified immunity.

I'd imagine even some folks in the room who don't have legal training might have heard about it.

It got a lot of attention in the press in recent years as there's been more attention paid to, you know, police misconduct and so forth.

It's a doctrine that makes it really, really hard to sue government officials.

And you were saying it's not in the statute.

So where does it come from?

History, maybe.

And your claim has been that there's no basis in history for this rule.