When does a private company get to hide behind the same legal shield that protects government officials from civil rights lawsuits?
The Institute filed a petition urging the Supreme Court to consider the case of Jim DeLanis, who spent nearly 40 years as an attorney at Baker Donelson, one of Tennessee’s largest law firms. DeLanis also served on the Davidson County Election Commission, where his official duties put him at odds with Nashville’s city government over a controversial property tax referendum.
Displeased by that opposition, the city pressured Baker Donelson—which held lucrative city contracts—to rein in DeLanis. When the firm’s pressure campaign failed to change DeLanis’s vote, Baker Donelson fired him.
DeLanis sued the city, city councilman Robert Mendes, and Baker Donelson. The Sixth Circuit agreed that Mendes had violated DeLanis’s clearly established First Amendment rights by orchestrating the pressure campaign.
However, the same court granted qualified immunity to Baker Donelson, even though the firm executed the retaliation. The majority reasoned that no prior precedent clearly established that a private law firm violates the First Amendment when it fires an employee in response to a government threat to its business.
The result, as a dissenting Sixth Circuit judge noted, contradicts itself: Baker Donelson was treated as a government actor to claim qualified immunity, then treated as a private party when deciding whether its conduct violated clearly established law.
The Institute’s petition asks the Supreme Court to resolve this inconsistency and repair a circuit split that leaves the law unsettled across the country. The First, Fourth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have all held that private parties are not immune from lawsuits when they violate someone’s rights to advance their own financial interests. The Sixth Circuit’s decision cuts the opposite way.
To read the Institute for Free Speech’s cert petition in DeLanis v. Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, P.C., click here. To read the press release, click here.
