Takeaway
In short, Carey v. Piphus makes § 1983 damages compensatory: a due-process violation warrants substantial damages only for proven injury, but it always supports nominal damages when actual injury cannot be shown.
Two Chicago public-school students, Jarius Piphus and Silas Brisco, each received 20-day suspensions without an adjudicative hearing. Piphus was accused of smoking marijuana on school grounds; Brisco was suspended for refusing to remove an earring that he said symbolized Black pride rather than gang membership. Both students sued school officials under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the suspensions denied them procedural due process.
The District Court held that the students had been denied due process and that the officials lacked qualified immunity, but it awarded no damages because the students had offered no evidence quantifying an injury. It also did not decide whether proper procedures would have changed the outcome of either suspension. The Seventh Circuit reversed, holding that the students could recover substantial nonpunitive damages for the denial of due process even if the suspensions were justified and they could not prove individualized injury. The Supreme Court granted review to decide whether a procedural-due-process violation alone supports substantial compensatory damages under § 1983.
Issue #1
Whether § 1983 permits substantial compensatory damages for a procedural-due-process violation without proof that the violation caused actual injury.
Holding
No. Section 1983 compensatory damages are intended to compensate injuries actually caused by the deprivation of a constitutional right, not to assign a monetary value to the right in the abstract.
Reasoning
Section 1983 creates a species of tort liability. The Court therefore began with the traditional tort principle that damages compensate a plaintiff for injury caused by the defendant's breach of duty. The statute's text, history, and the Court's prior decisions supported applying that compensation principle to constitutional-tort claims.
Common-law damages rules provide the starting point, but they must be adapted to the constitutional interest at stake. A court must tailor compensation to the particular right violated, so that real injuries caused by constitutional violations are compensated even where the common law supplies no perfectly analogous cause of action.
Deterrence does not justify an award of substantial compensatory damages without actual injury. Although punitive damages may sometimes deter or punish malicious constitutional violations, ordinary compensatory damages under § 1983 remain tied to injury caused by the violation. Attorney's-fee liability and other remedies also help discourage deliberate disregard of constitutional rights.
Issue #2
Whether students may recover damages for the consequences of their suspensions when the school can show they would have been suspended even after constitutionally adequate procedures.
Holding
No. If a proper hearing would have produced the same suspension, the denial of procedure did not cause the injuries flowing from the suspension itself.
Reasoning
Procedural due process primarily protects against mistaken or unjustified deprivations of life, liberty, or property. It does not guarantee that a person will avoid a deprivation that is substantively warranted.
Accordingly, if the District Court finds on remand that each student would have been suspended even with a proper hearing, lost school time and other harms caused by the suspension are not attributable to the procedural violation. Awarding damages for those harms would be a windfall rather than compensation.
Conversely, if proper procedures would have prevented or shortened a suspension, the students may recover damages for injuries that the lack of due process actually caused. The remand therefore required a determination of what would likely have occurred had constitutionally sufficient procedures been provided.
Issue #3
Whether mental and emotional distress may be presumed from every denial of procedural due process, and whether nominal damages are available when actual injury is unproved.
Holding
Emotional distress caused by the denial of due process is compensable only when proved; it may not be presumed. But a proven procedural-due-process violation supports nominal damages, not exceeding one dollar, even without proof of actual injury.
Reasoning
The Court rejected the analogy to defamation per se, where common law sometimes presumes injury because reputational harm is especially likely and difficult to establish. Not every procedural defect produces distress, particularly where the underlying deprivation was justified; an affected person may not even know of the defect until consulting counsel.
When a deprivation is substantively justified, any emotional distress may result from the justified outcome rather than from the inadequate procedure. That causation problem makes proof especially important: the plaintiff must show that distress was caused by the denial of process itself, rather than by the suspension or the finding of misconduct.
Mental and emotional distress is nevertheless a familiar, compensable form of injury. It may be shown through the circumstances of the violation and evidence of its effect on the particular plaintiff, without demanding mathematical precision in measuring the resulting damages.
A procedural-due-process right is absolute in the sense that entitlement to procedure does not depend on the ultimate merits of the person's substantive claim. Because society has an important interest in enforcing that right, its violation is actionable for nominal damages even when no actual injury is shown.