Somebody shouldn't be talking about kneejerk reactions, and it isn't me.
Did you see the "clearly established" part at the beginning of the sentence? How about what the Volokh Conspiracy described it: when they explicitly highlighted (using quotes) the "clearly established" part of the doctrine?
See, you seemed to misunderstand what the reasonableness affects. It's not whether the 'person should have known better', it's if it violates 'clearly established law'...
exactly the thing you pretended was separate from qualified immunity here:
See, your (wrong enough) description of qualified immunity elides the clearly established part of the definition, which is core to the problem.
Let's
read a little bit more:
Oh, look, they again talk about how a right being "clearly established" affects whether a qualified immunity defense matters.
The 'clearly established law' test is nearly the entirety of qualified immunity, and an entirety of people's complaints with it, and why it needs to die.
That, along with the fun game of the
Saucier sequencing (described above), no longer having to be followed, so the government gets a fun game of heads I win, tails you lose: if the complaint doesn't state a constitutional violation, the courts will point out that, and toss it out on its merits. But they can also ignore that part, and instead just point out it's not an established right, and toss it out for that and thus never establish a right in the first place.