Case Citator › Farmer v. Brennan

Farmer v. Brennan

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Limited by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
511 U.S. 825
Decided
Confirmed treatments
7
Flagged citations read
1,640 of 1,640
Citing cases (total)
28,444
Treatment dates
2020–2023
Limited by some courts
At least one reviewed court has limited this case’s holding to narrower facts or a narrower rule. No reviewed court has overruled it. Farmer v. Brennan is limited: all 1,640 flagged citations have been read, and the seven confirmed treatments are listed below. Five opinions confined Farmer's reach: four held that it did not itself establish a Bivens remedy in the circumstances before them, and the Fourth Circuit declined to extend its subjective Eighth Amendment test to pretrial detainees' Fourteenth Amendment claims after Kingsley v. Hendrickson.
More on how this was screened

Two later district-court opinions questioned Farmer's Bivens-remedy footing after Egbert v. Boule. The other reviewed opinions applied Farmer, distinguished it on facts, rejected arguments that later authority overruled it, described Farmer's own treatment of older law, or placed the flagged language on unrelated authorities and issues.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

28,444 later cases cite Farmer v. Brennan; 1,640 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Farmer v. Brennan?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Limited

  • The court held that Farmer did not itself recognize an implied Bivens remedy for an Eighth Amendment failure-to-protect claim and treated the claim as a new Bivens context that it would not extend.

    Hoffman v. Preston · E.D. Cal. · filed

    However, the U.S. Supreme Court never explicitly stated in Farmer that it was recognizing an implied Bivens Eighth Amendment failure to protect claim. Additionally, in Ziglar v. Abbasi, ____ U.S. ____, 137 S. Ct. 1843 (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court stated that Bivens, Davis v. Passman, 442 U.S. 228 (1979), and Carlson v. Green, 446 U.S. 14 (1980) “represent the only instances in which the Court has approved of an implied damages remedy under the Constitution itself.” Ziglar, 137 S. Ct. at 1854-55 (emphasis added). Therefore, since Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment failure to protect claim is “different in a meaningful way from” the claims raised in Bivens, Davis, and Carlson, the undersigned agrees with the Magistrate Judge’s finding that Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment failure to protect claim is a new Bivens context. … [T]he undersigned agrees with the Magistrate Judge’s determination that Plaintiff has or had alternative remedies available to him and that legislative action suggests that Congress does not want an implied damages remedy for Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment failure to protect claim.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The court held that Farmer established the substantive deliberate-indifference standard but did not recognize a Bivens damages remedy for Eighth Amendment conditions-of-confinement claims.

    Oden v. True · S.D. Ill. · filed

    Second, because Farmer focused on the proper standard for “deliberate indifference,” refusing to recognize a Bivens conditions of confinement claims would not overrule its holding. Farmer remains as established precedent as courts routinely apply Farmer’s holding when analyzing deliberate indifference in § 1983 claims. … Finally, the absence of any analysis in Farmer on whether to recognize a conditions of confinement Bivens claim is significant. … The omission of such an analysis in Farmer further precludes finding that the Court recognized a Bivens conditions of confinement claim.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The court held that Farmer assumed without deciding that a Bivens remedy existed and therefore did not establish an existing Bivens context for a federal pretrial detainee's Fifth Amendment failure-to-protect claim.

    Choice v. Mohan · N.D. Ill. · filed

    At the outset, we do not find Bistrian’s reliance on Farmer persuasive. Because “the only question before the Farmer Court was the proper standard for deliberate indifference, not whether to extend Bivens and recognize an implied cause of action for Eighth Amendment conditions of confinement claims,” the Court’s actions in Farmer were “akin to ‘assuming without deciding’” the Bivens issue “to focus on the question presented on appeal.” … A case that assumes the existence of a certain Bivens remedy does not constitute a holding that the remedy in fact exists. … We see no reason to treat Farmer any differently, especially when the Supreme Court has consistently omitted Farmer from the list of cases that recognize Bivens causes of action.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The court confined Farmer's implied Bivens remedy to deliberate indifference to inmate-assault risk and declined to extend it to a materially different medical-care claim where the potential harm never occurred.

    Cross v. United States · M.D. Pa. · filed

    Although Egbert, Hernandez, and Abbasi do not mention Farmer as one of the cases in which the Court recognized a Bivens remedy, our court of appeals has held, post-Abbasi, that Farmer recognized an implied Bivens remedy for claims that prison officials were deliberately indifferent to a risk that an inmate would be assaulted by other inmates. … We find that the instant case’s allegation of deliberate indifference to a serious medical need is notably different from the deliberate indifference to inmate assault alleged in Farmer.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Fourth Circuit held that Farmer's subjective Eighth Amendment deliberate-indifference standard does not extend to pretrial detainees' Fourteenth Amendment claims after Kingsley.

    Short v. Hartman · Fourth Circuit · filed

    Further, Kingsley repudiated the reasoning we followed in adopting the subjective test for deliberate indifference claims in the first place. Our precedent extended Farmer’s Eighth Amendment test to Fourteenth Amendment claims by dismissing the distinction between the two amendments as a distinction without a difference. See Martin, 1995 WL 82444, at *3; Ervin, 1997 WL 664606, at *4; Grayson, 195 F.3d at 695; Young, 238 F.3d at 575–76. Kingsley commands the opposite. “The language of the two Clauses differs, and the nature of the claims often differs.” Kingsley, 576 U.S. at 400. Specifically, Kingsley directs us to be more solicitous of the Fourteenth Amendment claims of a pretrial detainee than the Eighth Amendment claims of a post-conviction detainee, for “pretrial detainees (unlike convicted prisoners) cannot be punished at all.” Id. In fact, when the defendant officials in Kingsley argued that Eighth Amendment case law supplies the Fourteenth Amendment standard, Kingsley rejected that maneuver out of hand for failing to respect the distinctions between the amendments. Id. at 400–01. Because “there is no need here, as there might be in an Eighth Amendment case, to determine when punishment is unconstitutional,” the heightened, subjective Eighth Amendment deliberate indifference standard does not extend to Fourteenth Amendment cases. Id.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Questioned

  • The court ordered full briefing on whether Egbert undermined its Farmer-based determination that an Eighth Amendment failure-to-protect claim did not require extending Bivens.

    Stine v. Merrell · D. Ariz. · filed

    According to Defendant, the Supreme Court in Egbert v. Boule, 142 S. Ct. 1793 (2022) has called into question the Bivens framework as jurisdictional authority for this case. Before proceeding further, the Court called for full briefing to establish its jurisdiction over this action. In other words, does Egbert call into question this Court’s determination in its screening order that Count I may proceed under Bivens, whereas Count III, First Amendment right of access to the courts, was dismissed. The Court held: Plaintiff’s Eighth Amendment failure-to-protect claim does not require an extension of Bivens. See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994) (prison officials liable under Bivens for violations of federal prisoner’s Eighth Amendment rights).
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The court questioned whether Farmer remains authority recognizing an implied Bivens remedy after Hernandez, Egbert, and Dongarra, although it continued to follow controlling circuit precedent.

    Braxton v. United States · M.D. Pa. · filed

    Although Egbert, Hernandez, and Abbasi do not mention Farmer as one of the cases in which the Court recognized a Bivens remedy, our court of appeals has held, post-Abbasi, that Farmer recognized an implied Bivens remedy for claims that prison officials were deliberately indifferent to a risk that an inmate would be assaulted by other inmates. See Bistrian v. Levi, 912 F.3d 79, 90-91 (3d Cir. 2018). The Supreme Court’s more recent decisions in Hernandez and Egbert and our court of appeals’ decision in Dongarra v. Smith, 27 F.4th 174 (3d Cir. 2022) cloud this conclusion.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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