Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982) holds that “qualified immunity” shields government officials from liability “insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” In other words, reasonable ignorance of the law is an excuse for state or federal employees performing discretionary functions where their actions, even if later found to be unlawful, did not violate “clearly established law.” Thus, a government agent’s civil rights lawsuit liability now no longer turns on whether the defendant acted with “malice,” but on whether a hypothetical reasonable person in the defendant’s position would have known that her actions violated clearly established law.