4 States Banned Qualified Immunity. Alabama Just Expanded It Instead.

The Supreme Court created the doctrine and has consistently declined to revisit it

Qualified immunity shields government officials, including police officers, from civil lawsuits unless their actions violated a "clearly established" constitutional right, generally requiring plaintiffs to find an almost identical prior court case as precedent. The doctrine emerged from 1960s Supreme Court decisions and was substantially expanded in the Court's 1982 Harlow v. Fitzgerald ruling. Since then, the Court has largely declined to reconsider it, repeatedly turning down cases that would have provided an opportunity for reform.

A rare, notable exception was Taylor v. Riojas, where the Court denied immunity to officers who held a prisoner in cells covered in human feces for six days, a specific example egregious enough to overcome the doctrine's protection. But legal analysts note this ruling's facts were so extreme that it has had little practical impact on the vast majority of more ordinary qualified immunity cases since.

With the Supreme Court unmoved, states have become the real site of active reform, in both directions

Four states, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico, have now completely banned police officers from using qualified immunity as a defense in state court, according to Institute for Justice tracking. Colorado led this trend in 2020 with SB 217, creating a new civil action for rights violations that explicitly states qualified immunity is not a valid defense. Connecticut, New Mexico (via a separate Civil Rights Act), and New York City (through a 2021 city ordinance affecting NYPD officers specifically) have created similar, if narrower, alternative accountability paths.

But the trend runs the opposite direction elsewhere: Alabama passed the 2025 "Back the Blue Protection Act," which specifically expanded qualified immunity protections for police, narrowing the circumstances under which officers can be held liable to cases involving reckless or intentional constitutional violations, and requiring a judge, rather than a jury, to make that threshold determination. It's important to note all these state-level changes affect state law claims only, they cannot limit federal qualified immunity or federal Section 1983 claims, since only Congress or the Supreme Court can change the doctrine at that level.

Congress has two directly opposing bills active in the same session

• The Ending Qualified Immunity Act (H.R. 3602 in the House, S. 1913 in the Senate) would amend federal law to prevent "good faith" or "not clearly established" rights defenses from being used in civil lawsuits against law enforcement, effectively abolishing the doctrine at the federal level entirely
• The competing Qualified Immunity Act of 2025 (H.R. 503 and S. 122) would do the opposite: formally codify qualified immunity into statute for the first time, giving the court-created doctrine explicit congressional backing rather than leaving it as purely judge-made law
• Both bills remain active as of the most recent tracking, with neither having advanced significantly further than committee as of early 2026, reflecting the same deep partisan split playing out at the state level
• Advocacy group tracking describes bipartisan support as having genuinely grown for reform specifically, even as the two competing bills show the underlying disagreement over what "reform" should actually mean remains fully unresolved

This is genuinely not limited to police, a common point of confusion worth clarifying

While qualified immunity is most famously associated with police misconduct cases, the doctrine actually protects most government officials performing discretionary duties, not police specifically. This is legally distinct from "absolute immunity," a separate, even stronger protection reserved for specific roles like judges, prosecutors, and legislators performing their core official functions, which offers essentially complete protection from civil suits regardless of intent, unlike qualified immunity's "clearly established right" threshold.

The core disagreement

Reform advocates generally argue qualified immunity has evolved into a near-insurmountable barrier that shields even clearly wrongful conduct from accountability simply because no sufficiently similar prior case exists, and point to state-level reforms in Colorado and similar states as evidence that removing the defense doesn't produce the flood of frivolous litigation or officer recruitment crisis critics warn about. Defenders of the doctrine, reflected in both the Supreme Court's continued reluctance to revisit it and legislative efforts like Alabama's 2025 expansion, generally argue it protects officials from personal financial ruin over good-faith split-second decisions made in genuinely ambiguous legal situations, and that removing it entirely could make officials excessively risk-averse or discourage qualified candidates from taking on public service roles at all. Both sides broadly agree that only Congress or the Supreme Court can resolve this at the federal level definitively, meaning the current state-by-state patchwork, moving in genuinely opposite directions depending on the state, is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.