From federal and state constitutions to laws like Section 1983, our legal system creates powerful tools to shield citizens from government overreach or abuse of power. But those same laws also build shields around government officials, through immunity in its many forms. A police officer can invoke qualified immunity to avoid a lawsuit. Prosecutors or judges can stand behind absolute immunity. The President can claim both civil and criminal immunity for “official acts.” And the list goes on.

For our Spring 2025 symposium, we at The Trojan Review seek to ask: why protect people from the government—and then protect the government from people? We invite undergraduate students to untangle these webs of immunity via law review notes that can, for example, parse recent immunity decisions from the Supreme Court and lower courts, or trace the historical roots of those decisions. A strong law review note might take a recent immunity case and tell us where the judges went right or wrong, suggest a better way to decide when officials deserve protection, or explain how different immunity doctrines fit together—or why they don’t.