Lawyer Listings Add, Update, or Remove Listings

Section 1983 Civil Rights Claim

The federal statute allowing someone to sue a state or local official personally for violating their constitutional rights.

Informational only - this is not legal advice. These definitions explain general legal vocabulary in plain English. They are not advice about your situation, reading them creates no attorney-client relationship, and the law differs from state to state and changes over time. For advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state.

What it means

Section 1983 is the vehicle for most constitutional claims against state and local government in the United States. It creates no rights of its own; it provides a way to enforce rights that already exist under the Constitution or federal law, against a person acting under colour of state law - a police officer, a corrections officer, a school or county official.

Two features shape almost every case. The defendant must have been acting under state authority, which is what separates these claims from ordinary disputes between private parties. And a local government body is not liable simply because it employed the person: liability attaches where the violation followed an official policy, a custom, or a failure to train amounting to deliberate indifference, rather than on the ordinary employer-liability principle people expect.

The defence that decides many of these cases is qualified immunity, which protects an official unless the right violated was clearly established at the time in a way a reasonable official would have understood. It is frequently resolved before trial, and it is the reason two cases with similar facts can end very differently.

Where this comes from

42 U.S.C. § 1983, with attorney's fees for a prevailing party under 42 U.S.C. § 1988. Municipal liability comes from Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978); qualified immunity from a line of Supreme Court decisions including Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982). Claims against federal officers proceed on a different and considerably narrower footing, and claims against state governments themselves are constrained by state sovereign immunity.

When people hire a lawyer for this

These are specialist claims and the reasons to get advice early are evidentiary rather than tactical: body-camera footage, incident reports and dispatch records are retained under agency schedules that can be short, and a preservation request made early is sometimes the difference between a provable claim and an unprovable one. Notice requirements for claims against public bodies are also strict and separate from anything else - and they can be very much shorter than people expect.

Find a lawyer for this in your state

Choose your state. Each link opens the directory page for the city in that state with the most currently published law firms in this practice area; a +n beside the city is how many other cities in the state also have one. The list is generated when this page loads, so a state whose listings have lapsed drops out rather than becoming a dead link.

« All glossary terms

Part of the LawyerLand plain-English legal glossary. Definitions are written from primary sources - statutes and court rules - and each entry states the authority it rests on, or says plainly when the doctrine is state law with no national rule.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, civil legal aid programmes provide free help with many of these problems: civil legal aid programmes by state.

Related free reference tools: statute of limitations for a personal-injury claim, by state, quoted from each state's official text - part of LawyerLand's legal reference tools.