News Archive

Professor Gerard Magliocca talked about the issue of qualified immunity for law enforcement officers. His comments are part of a news story that appears in the Kokomo Perspective.

Qualified immunity protects government officials from the financial burden of lawsuits when they are acting in good faith. While protecting police officers, it essentially blocks the means of restitution for those who believe they have been harmed by police.

The question of whether removing qualified immunity would improve policing is under intense debate and study. Compensating those who have been harmed is positive, but “Ideally, we would like there to be fewer wrongs being committed,” Professor Magliocca said in the story. “I don’t think people that study this think it will be some kind of silver bullet that will dramatically improve things. It’s just a step in the right direction in getting people recovery and making it clearer that police can be held accountable when they do something wrong”

Professor Magliocca, a well-known constitutional law scholar, is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law at IU McKinney. He is the author of four books, the latest of which, The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He also is the author of over 20 articles on constitutional law and intellectual property. He was named to the 2019-2020 class of fellows for the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.