Constitutional law violations

authorize an action for any constitutional violation, including an in- fringement of procedural due process In Davis v

Passman, 77 the Court recognized an implied cause of action and damages remedy for a viola- tion of the equal protection component of the fifth amendment's due process clause

Congress has enacted statutes that allow private persons to file suit for violations of constitutional rights, such as 42 U

S C § 1983

In order to prevail in a § 1983 claim, a plaintiff must show that the defendant acted “under color of” law to deprive them of their constitutional rights

If the harmless error doctrine tells us it’s fine to ignore some violations of the Constitution because we are confident the same result would have ob- tained absent the error, how can we say some errors are in principle worse than others and thus ineligible for harmless error analysis? C