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sonality liability charges against the Supervisors.
Absolute Immunity
In his brief, Robin argued that members of Boards of Supervisors enjoyed the same absolute immunity accorded to State Legislators while acting within the sphere of their actual public duties. “Absolute immunity is accorded to those public officials who are called on upon to exercise a high degree of discretion,” Robin stated.
He noted in his brief that the United States Supreme Court has not passed on the specific question of absolute immunity in the case of local legislators but maintained that a rational existed for extending the absolute immunity afforded to State legislators on to county legislators. “The county is a political subdivision of the state and exercises a wide range of legislative functions on the authority delegated to it by the state,” he stated. “The county is a closely related arm of the state, particularly in the legislative field.”
Robin noted that the Board of Supervisors, as a body politic, has “sovereign immunity against tortious acts” and argued that the individual Board members are also covered by sovereign immunity against suits for tortious acts committed while they are acting within the sphere of actual legislative activity. This is according to a long standing common-law doctrine in Anglo-Saxon American jurisprudence, Robin’s brief continued. The underlying rationale for this doctrine is “to prevent threat of personal lawsuit from burdening governmental policy-making.”
In the brief, Robin quotes extensively from an opinion rendered by Judge Learned Hand. In a case involving personal liability filed against a local governing body, Hand held that “to submit all officials, the innocent as well as the guilty, to the burden of a trail and to the inevitable danger of its outcome, would dampen the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible, to the unflinching discharge of their duties. Again and again, the public interest calls for action which may turn out to be founded on a mistake, in the face of which an official may find himself hard put to it to satisfy a jury of his good faith. There must indeed be a means of punishing public officers who have been truant to their duties; but that is quite another matter from exposing such as have been honestly mistaken to suit by anyone who has suffered from their errors... It has been thought in the end better to leave unredressed the wrongs done by dishonest officers than to subject those who try to do their duty to the ^constant threat of retaliation.”
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