John Hodorowski and Jeraldine Hodorowski v. Ann Ray, Mary Ellen Burns and Texas Department of Human Resources, Defendants

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding caseworkers' actions objectively reasonable and not violative of clearly established right and therefore shielded from liability under their qualified immunity
• concluding that the right to family integrity was too “nebulous” for the social worker defendants to have known that an attempt to obtain temporary custody of the children during an abuse investigation was a violation of a clearly established constitutional right
• finding that the “temporary” nature of a removal was “alone [] sufficient to prevent us from concluding that appellants’ conduct violated clearly established law”
• recognizing the “unsuitability of such a general right [to family integrity] to fix liability in particularized circumstances”
• finding absolute immunity is not essential to the proper functioning of child protective service workers
• finding a four-day removal of children from their father’s home, without a court order, did not constitute a violation of clearly established law

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).