Alaska Employment Law

This Friday morning the Alaska Supreme Court held that procurement officers, when sued individually by disappointed bidders for erroneous decisions, are entitled to only qualified, not absolute immunity.  The Court dismissed the officials’ request for absolute immunity, in part, because they failed to present “hard evidence” or “empirical evidence” that a grant of qualified immunity would lead to increased litigation against procurement officials.  The Court (per Chief Justice Carpeneti) noted that “arguments based solely on intuition are unpersuasive in this context . . ..”

A similar “floodgates” argument often emerges when a plaintiff seeks to apply tort law to unfamiliar facts.   Both parties often rely on nothing more than “intuition” (i.e., self-promoting speculation) to advance their arguments about the impact of judicial acceptance of their respective positions.  Unless the Court’s reference to “this context” in the last quote indicates the Court’s intent to restrict this rule to immunity cases, this morning’s holding suggests that plaintiffs had better present hard, empirical evidence about the few additional cases filed in foreign courts after they accepted plaintiff-like arguments.
Weed v. Bachner Company Inc., Op. No. 6475 (Alaska May 14, 2010).

Michael Kramer from Borgeson & Burns in Fairbanks represents the bidders.  Janell Hafner, Juneau AAG, represents the officials.