Wilkie v. Robbins, 551 U.S. 537 (2007), was a United States Supreme Court case that concerned the scope of qualified immunity for government officials working in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
Specifically, the Supreme Court held that BLM employees could not be liable for an alleged retaliation claim against Robbins, a farm owner, because other avenues for relief were available.
The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reversed, finding that judicial relief was open for "constitutional violations committed by individual federal employees unrelated to final agency action."
Justice David Souter wrote the majority opinion which reversed the Tenth Circuit and held that the BLM agents were not liable for the alleged retaliation.
While he joined the entirety of Souter's majority opinion, he stressed that attaching liability to government officials' conduct was "a relic of the heady days in which this Court assumed common-law powers to create causes of action."