For years, the Supreme Court has turned a deaf ear to arguments that police officers should not be shielded by the legal doctrine of âqualified immunityâ when they shoot or brutalize innocent civilians. âQualified immunityâ is just one of
several rules invented by judges that stop the vindication of basic rights. But arenât courts supposed to be protectors of individual rights? In The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies, Aziz Z. Huq recounts a far more fraught history in which
the link between the Constitutionâs system of independent courts and the protection of constitutional rights has always been tenuous.
Federal courts have created many legal concepts such as âqualified immunityâ that may seem abstract, but inflict real-world harms: A bureaucrat fires her employee for testifying in a legal proceeding involving the bossâs family. Police
officers set a dog on a homeless man, leaving him severely wounded. A Mexican teenager is shot in the back at the US borderâand dies. In all these cases, defendants walk away with minor or no penalties. Their victims had rightsâbut
no remedies thanks to rules created by federal judges.
A powerful historical account of how courts have carved a gap between rights and remedies, this book will reshape our understanding of why itâs so difficult to hold the American state to the rule of law.