Protest season is in full swing. A five-month campaign of fast-food-worker demonstrations reached its crescendo in September with marches in New York, Detroit, and dozens of other cities; a climate-change march later that month saw more than 100 protesters arrested in New York; and two months of protests against police in Ferguson, Missouri are set to coalesce in a “Weekend of Resistance” in and around the city starting Friday.
Along with all that free speech comes a very real risk of unlawful detention, physical injury, and gagging — metaphorical and literal — on the part of overzealous police. While those who have been manhandled by the police can’t literally strike back, they can use a powerful and increasingly effective legal avenue to hit cops and police departments where it really hurts: the wallet.
The avenue: a federal law known as Section 1983. Passed by Congress as part the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Section 1983 allows anyone whose Constitutional rights were violated by state employees to sue for damages in a federal court. It’s the basis for a $40 million lawsuit filed against the Ferguson police by five individuals arrested during the protests.
While the law is more than 143 years old, in its second century it has become a powerful check against state and local government overreach. Why now? Well, for one thing, civil rights are a lot further along than they were in the Reconstruction Era. For context, at the time Section 1983 was enacted, women would wait 48 years for the 19th Amendment (giving them the right to vote) and African Americans had another 84 years to go until the Supreme Court ended segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
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