Courtney Elgart Files U.S. Supreme Court Amicus Brief in Law Enforcement Abuse Case

Courtney Elgart, now a partner at EFC LLP, authored a 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 earlier in Ziglar v. Abbasi, and doing so without the judicial and public scrutiny that attends an express overruling.

She filed the brief with Sheldon Eisenberg while at her prior firm, Sullivan & Triggs, LLP.