John Rappaport, How Private Insurers Regulate Public Police, 130 Harvard Law Review 1539 (2017). Constitutional tort remedies, like their common law counterparts, are presumed to deter future violations. But the inference of deterrence depends, of course, on a number of sub-inferences that may not hold. For example, deterrence may not obtain if the officer is indemnified and therefore does not feel the personal sting of a money judgment. In a recent article, Professor Joanna Schwartz showed that officer indemnity is, in fact, nearly universal. But maybe deterrence might still obtain because the police department, which has to foot the bill of the indemnification agreement, will push its officers to obey the law. In another article, however, Professor Schwartz showed that this might not happen because most departments carry liability insurance and the cost of indemnification will often simply disappear into a budget line item for insurance … (more)
[Jack Preis, JOTWELL, 21 June]
First posted 2018-06-21 12:47:13
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