The Supreme Court has increasingly moved towards a single, uniform legal standard in the area of constitutional remedies. The boundaries between the legal tests used to determine the availability of relief in the post-conviction habeas, constitutional tort, and exclusionary rule contexts have steadily been eroding. There is a natural tendency to think about these kinds of moves towards trans-substantive doctrinal uniformity as positive developments: just as in the sciences, grand unifying theories in law have an aura of elegance about them. In many ways, this aura is well deserved. Treating like things alike is one of the fundamental metrics by which we evaluate the fairness and legitimacy of a legal system. But doctrinal uniformity also comes with a cost. Replacing narrow, piecemeal legal doctrines with broad, unifying regimes necessarily entails a sacrifice of nuance. And it’s not obvious, in the abstract, whether wide-ranging doctrinal coherence is preferable to a more flexible, ad hoc approach.

This Note argues that in the particular area of constitutional remedies, the Supreme Court’s recent trend towards uniformity is ill-advised. Although there are important commonalities across constitutional remedies, and useful insights that can be gained by conceptualizing them similarly, their purposes are better served by maintaining clear divisions between their legal frameworks. Significant differences in the roles played and problems addressed by each counsel in favor of doctrinal separateness. This is particularly true when it comes to how the availability of constitutional remedies interacts with the problem of “new law”-how to think about government action that is ultimately held to be unconstitutional, but whose legality was unclear at the time it was taken. This Note then applies this general critique to the specific case of the Court’s current approach to qualified immunity. In particular, it argues that the Court’s recent jurisprudence regarding what is required to “clearly establish” a constitutional right too closely mimics the standard of clearly established law required for post-conviction habeas relief under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, and fails to adequately balance the competing objectives unique to the constitutional torts context. By refocusing the discussion on qualified immunity’s particular role within the larger constitutional remedial scheme, this Note suggests some ways to bring the doctrine back in line with those purposes.