Qualified Immunity and Constitutional Avoidance

Constitutional and non-specific immunity to infection.

Most immunologists focus on elaborate non-specific and antigen-specific factors of reactive immunity produced by the vertebrate lymphoid system. Modern principles of immunogenic prophylaxis and therapy are based solely on the use of these agents. There is, however, a more effective system of specific resistance which is shared by all forms of life: hereditary constitutional immunity to infectio...

Death at a Young Age: Custodial Suicide and Qualified Immunity

I have written a good deal about Coleman v. Wilson, 912 F.Supp 1282 (E.D. Cal. 1995)(the original decision) in my Landmark Cases Appendix in Fred Cohen, The Mentally Disordered Inmate and the Law, App. B-104 (1998). If one reads enough correctional law decisions from California you would expect to be immune from shock, particularly after Plata v. Schwarzenegger, No. C01-1351 (February 14, 2006)...

Constitutional mass torts: sovereign immunity and the human radiation experiments.

Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Culture

Constitutional theorists and other constitutional commentators make heavy use of a paradigm that mistakes certain aspects of our current constitutional decisionmaking process for inherent parts of our constitutional structure and ignores other important aspects of that process entirely. These distortions and elisions raise concerns about the accuracy of much descriptive constitutional commentar...

Neural regulation of immunity: role of NPR-1 in pathogen avoidance and regulation of innate immunity.

The nervous and immune systems consist of complex networks that have been known to be closely interrelated. However, given the complexity of the nervous and immune systems of mammals, including humans, the precise mechanisms by which the two systems influence each other remain understudied. To cut through this complexity, we used the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a simple system to study t...