Tower v. Glover

What Happened

John Glover was convicted in Idaho state court. He later sued his court-appointed public defenders under § 1983, alleging they had intentionally conspired with state officials to secure his conviction and keep him in prison.

The lower courts dismissed the case on immunity grounds. The argument was that public defenders needed the same kind of protection other courtroom actors often receive.

What the Court Decided

The Supreme Court rejected that argument.

The Court held that public defenders are not immune from § 1983 liability when they are accused of intentionally conspiring with state officials to violate a client’s rights. The Court said there was no well-established common-law immunity in 1871 for that kind of misconduct, and § 1983 did not create one.

That matters because the Court did not treat silence in the statute as enough to invent another protection. It looked for a real historical basis and did not find one.

What It Means in Practice

Tower v. Glover is important because it cuts against the idea that courts always import common-law-style protections into § 1983 whenever the statute is silent.

Here, the statute did not expressly reject immunity. But the Court still refused to create one.

That makes Tower a useful case for the textualist criticism of court-made barriers. When the Court wanted to, it was capable of saying:

• no, that protection is not in the statute
• no, the historical record does not justify importing it
• no, the Court will not add it on its own

How You Can Use It

Use Tower when you need to show that the Court has not applied one automatic rule of preserving every old protection unless Congress expressly abolished it.

It also helps when you want to show that some immunity arguments fail because the historical basis is weak or missing.

How It Can Be Used Against You

Defendants may try to cabin Tower tightly. They will say it applies only to intentional conspiratorial misconduct by public defenders, not to other actors or other doctrines.

That limitation is real. But even with that limitation, Tower still matters because it shows the Court had another path available: it could refuse to create a protection not grounded in the statute or the actual common-law record.