Public Administrators' Official Immunity and the Supreme Court: Developments during the 1970s
分析了1970年代美国最高法院关于公共行政官员官方豁免权的判决内容，并解释其对当代行政国家的重要性。
T he decade of the 1970s witnessed many changes in public administration in the United States. At the forefront of these have been the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the emergence of Proposition 13 style taxpayer protests in the wake of public sector labor strife and depleted governmental resources, the rise of affirmative action, and the decline of the citizen participation movement. Consistent with the past, the core values of representatives, executive leadership, and neutral competence' continued to play a major role in American public administration. Toward the end of the decade, the latter two values and their accompanying concerns with accountability, responsibility, efficiency, and economy were particularly central to public administrative debate.2 Although less well-known, the 1970s also witnessed a number of Supreme Court decisions of fundamental importance to public administration in the United States. Some of these, including decisions dealing with the rights of public employees and federalism, have been analyzed elsewhere,3 but others of equal or even greater potential importance, such as those involving the immunity of administrative officials have been largely ignored. Broadly stated, the doctrine of official immunity renders government officials . . immune from liability for their actions ... even though their conduct, if performed in other ... contexts, would in itself be unconstitutional or otherwise contrary to criminal or civil statute.4 This article will analyze the content of Supreme Court decisions affecting public administrators' immunity and explain their importance for the contemporary administrative state.