Landmark Publications

Municipal Liability and 42 U.S.C. 1983 Landmark Publications

THIS CASEBOOK contains a selection of U. S. Court of Appeals decisions that analyze and discuss issues surrounding municipal liability under 42 U. S. C. § 1983. Volume 2 of the casebook covers the Sixth through the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. * * * A municipality may be held liable as a "person" under 42 U. S. C. § 1983 when it maintains a policy or custom that causes the deprivation of a plaintiff's federally protected rights. Monell, 436 U. S. at 694, 98 S. Ct. 2018. To state such a claim, a plaintiff must allege either that (1) "a particular municipal action itself violates federal law, or directs an employee to do so"; or (2) the municipality, through inaction, failed to implement adequate policies or procedures to safeguard its community members' federally protected rights. Board of Commissioners of Bryan County v. Brown, 520 U. S. 397, 404, 407-08, 117 S. Ct. 1382, 137 L. Ed.2d 626 (1997); see also Tsao v. Desert Palace, Inc., 698 F.3d 1128, 1143 (9th Cir. 2012). When [ ] a plaintiff pursues liability based on a failure to act, she must allege that the municipality exhibited deliberate indifference to the violation of her federally protected rights. Tsao, 698 F.3d at 1143. Deliberate indifference is "a stringent standard of fault, requiring proof that a municipal actor disregarded a known or obvious consequence of his action." Brown, 520 U. S. at 410, 117 S. Ct. 1382. Deliberate indifference exists when the need "for more or different" action "is so obvious, and the inadequacy [of existing practice] so likely to result in the violation of constitutional rights, that the policymakers of the city can reasonably be said to have been deliberately indifferent to the need." City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U. S. 378, 390 & n.10, 109 S. Ct. 1197, 103 L. Ed.2d 412 (1989). A plaintiff can meet this standard in one of two ways. In some circumstances, the policy may be so facially deficient that any reasonable policymaker would recognize the need to take action. Brown, 520 U. S. at 409, 117 S. Ct. 1382. When that is the case, a plaintiff need point only to the policy itself to establish that the municipality's policymakers were on notice that the plaintiff's federally protected rights would likely be violated if they failed to act. See id. Alternatively, if the policy is not obviously, facially deficient, a plaintiff must ordinarily point to a pattern of prior, similar violations of federally protected rights, of which the relevant policymakers had actual or constructive notice. Connick v. Thompson, 563 U. S. 51, 62, 131 S. Ct. 1350, 179 L. Ed.2d 417 (2011); Clouthier v. County of Contra Costa, 591 F.3d 1232, 1253 (9th Cir. 2010), overruled on other grounds by Castro, 833 F.3d at 1070. Hyun Ju Park v. City and County of Honolulu, 952 F. 3d 1136 (9th Cir. 2020)