“A Sordid Case”: Stump v. Sparkman, Judicial Immunity, and the Other Side of Reproductive Rights

Laura T. Kessler

This Article presents a new historical account of Stump v. Sparkman, one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in the past fifty years. Stump is the 1978 judicial immunity opinion in which the Supreme Court declared that judges are absolutely immune from liability for their official judicial acts, even if such acts are done maliciously or flawed by the commission of grave procedural errors. The context of the case was horrific. It involved the involuntary sterilization of a fifteen-year-old girl; she was sterilized pursuant to a court order that her mother had obtained from a state judge without any notice to the child, appointment of a lawyer to represent her, presentation of evidence, or opportunity to appeal. As an adult she sued the judge and lost on the basis of the judicial immunity doctrine.

The basic project of this Article is to show why this largely overlooked case is important in American constitutional law beyond the narrow issue of judicial immunity, recovering it as a canonical decision relevant to contemporary debates about constitutional reproductive rights and procedural due process. Specifically, this Article suggests that Stump emerged from an ongoing set of discussions about the nature and scope of then-nascent constitutional protections for reproductive rights, as well as access to the federal courts by civil rights claimants. These issues continue to be contested today, as courts and states reign in the scope of reproductive rights, and as federal judges increasingly employ procedural rules limiting the ability of civil rights victims to pursue their claims and receive a decision on the merits in federal court. As these questions continue to filter through the courts, a close examination of the historical antecedents to these trends, as reflected in earlier Supreme Court decisions such as Stump, can help courts envision more just alternatives to the present course on these fundamentally important procedural and substantive questions.