Sullivan & Triggs Files U.S. Supreme Court Amicus Brief in Law Enforcement Abuse Case

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Sullivan & Triggs, LLP has filed a motion for leave and brief of amicus curiae in the Supreme Court of the United States on behalf of Peter H. Schuck, the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale, in support of the petitioner in Byrd v. Lamb, No. 21-184.

The petition asks whether a person subjected to an unreasonable search or seizure by a line-level federal officer during ordinary law enforcement activity may seek money damages under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388 (1971). Kevin Byrd alleges that a federal agent brandished a firearm at him and threatened his life over a personal dispute involving the agent's son. The Fifth Circuit held that those facts presented a "new context" beyond Bivens.

Drawing on Professor Schuck's four decades of scholarship on the civil liability of public officials, the brief argues that the Fifth Circuit confined Bivens to its literal facts rather than its factual equivalents—functionally overturning a fifty-year-old precedent that the Supreme Court reaffirmed just four years ago in Ziglar v. Abbasi, and doing so without the judicial and public scrutiny that attends an express overruling.

The Sullivan & Triggs team includes Courtney Elgart and Sheldon Eisenberg. The full brief is available here. The case docket, including all filings, can be viewed on the Supreme Court's website here.

About Sullivan & Triggs, LLP

Sullivan & Triggs, LLP is a Santa Monica–based law firm with a litigation practice spanning entertainment law, complex civil litigation, and arbitration.