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Limiting the Liability of Private Employees For Constitutional Violations

By Mark A. Davis
April 26, 2006

Over the last decade, one of the major trends in this country has been the privatization of services by governments. The federal government has increasingly ' with the approval of Congress ' contracted out to private entities functions that historically had been performed only by governments themselves.

This privatization of federal services has spawned a variety of legal issues. One of the most significant is whether employees of these private entities can be sued for monetary damages, in the same fashion that public employees can be sued, by people who assert that these employees violated their constitutional rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit recently shed light on this issue in the case of Holly v. Scott, 434 F.3d 287 (4th Cir. 2006).

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