Qualified immunity defeats two claims against school district defendants

The Court of Appeals finds that a teacher who was denied a position over a prior sexual misconduct finding cannot proceed with his lawsuit because he did not have a clearly-established right under the due process clause to seek "meaningful employment."

The case is Mudge v. Zugalla, issued on September 12. Mudge was a physical education teacher who was found in the late 2000s to have groomed two students for a sexual relationship after they were to have graduated. After plaintiff resigned his position, he then applied to work for a different school district, first as a school principal and, when that position fell through, as a substitute teacher. Plaintiff got the substitute teaching position, but the lawyer who prosecuted him for the prior misconduct found out about it, and he grew concerned that plaintiff did not have the moral character to work in the schools because he did not reveal the prior discipline in seeking this position. In fact, plaintiff was not required to report this discipline in applying for the substitute position. A school district investigator questioned why plaintiff was even hired in light of his background, but he became a permanent substitute at some point, but was denied the opportunity to extend that employment into the following year. Then the local newspaper ran a story about plaintiff's removal from the substitute teacher list.

Mudge sues the disciplinary-prosecutor and the district-investigator for due process violations, claiming they prevented him from pursuing his career and also subjecting him to "stigma plus" defamation, also a due process violation, arising from that newspaper article which has prevented plaintiff from finding another position. The timeline here sounds complicated, and it's that complication that gives the defendants qualified immunity. The Second Circuit therefore reverses the district court's contrary ruling, which denied the immunity defenses and ordered the case to trial. Under the appellate ruling, however, there will be no trial.

Qualified immunity is a defense to constitutional damages claims. The defendant is immune if the law was not sufficiently clear at the time of the violation such that she gets the benefit of the doubt when someone sues her for the rights violation. That's the situation here. If you handle Section 1983 claims, you know all about this immunity. Mudge is learning about immunity the hard way.

While lower courts have said that New York recognizes that a teaching licensee is entitled to meaningful employment, the Supreme Court and Second Circuit have never formally recognized that right. The law was therefore not clearly established when plaintiff got the shaft, so the defendants are off the hook on the theory that they could not have known they were violating his rights.

The stigma-plus claim is also gone. These cases allow you to sue a governmental official for defamation if it causes you to lose your job or it interferes with employment opportunities. I can tell you these cases are hard to win, as the legal standard is too high for most plaintiffs to satisfy. Like the due process claim, plaintiff's stigma-plus claim fails under the qualified immunity doctrine, as it was not clearly established at the time that a governmental defendant's "notice of the mere existence of an internal investigation into a license holder's behavior, without some detail as to the possible misconduct being investigated, could give rise to a stigma-plus claim." While the defendants in this case did publicize such an internal investigation, and while plaintiff claims that interfered with is employment prospects, the law was too fuzzy at the time for defendants to be on notice that they were breaking the law.