The Problems with Alleging Federal Government Conspiracies Under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3)

To properly allege a conspiracy under § 1985(3)¿the less-familiar cousin to § 1983¿a litigant must overcome many barriers. Many of these come from the statute itself. But in Ziglar v. Abbasi, a case concerning the post-9/11 detention of Muslim and Arab men, the Supreme Court added two more barriers¿each ostensibly linked to proving the conspiracy element¿that do not actually derive from the statute: the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine and qualified immunity. This Comment explains why neither of these doctrines should limit plaintiffs¿ claims in the manner applied by the Court.

The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine should be abandoned completely. And qualified immunity should not apply to the conspiracy element. Instead, it should only apply to elements affecting the plaintiff¿s rights.