Lozelle Lenoir
Volume I of the HabeasHelper Press PLRA Field Manual mapped the procedural gates the Prison Litigation Reform Act puts in front of the federal courthouse door: who counts as a prisoner, what counts as a prison-conditions case, exhaustion of administrative remedies, filing fees and in forma pauperis, the three-strikes rule, sua sponte screening, and pleading standards after Twombly and Iqbal. Volume II picks up where the procedural gates end and the constitutional claim begins.Seventeen chapters walk pro se litigants, new lawyers, and students through the civil-rights theories prisoners actually plead: Section 1983 for state and local prisoners; Bivens for federal prisoners; Eighth Amendment claims; Fourteenth Amendment claims by pretrial detainees; First Amendment claims; and qualified immunity. The volume then covers the PLRA’s limits on recovery, including the Section 1997e(e) physical-injury requirement, the Section 1997e(d) fee cap, and damages, before turning to discovery, summary judgment, trial practice, prospective relief under 18 U.S.C. Section 3626 and its termination, consent decrees and PLRA settlements, class actions, and appeals.This revised Second Edition printing (October 2026) adds Goldey v. Fields (2025), which holds that Bivens does not extend to Eighth Amendment excessive-force claims; a note on the pending case Nielsen v. Watanabe, which concerns the scope of the Carlson v. Green Bivens remedy for prisoner medical care; and Zorn v. Linton (2026) on how specific clearly established law must be.Twelve appendices supply practice materials: element checklists for the major constitutional claims, a qualified-immunity research template, sample discovery requests for deliberate-indifference medical and excessive-force cases, a sample expert disclosure, a PLRA-compliant fee petition template, a circuit-by-circuit physical-injury survey, sample jury instructions, a settlement-agreement template with fee preservation, a table of cases, a table of statutes and regulations, and a subject-matter index.The Second Edition reflects United States Supreme Court decisions and related developments through 2026. Primary audience: prisoners’ lawyers, civil-rights practitioners, public-defender offices, clinical professors and students, court staff attorneys, and pro se litigants.This book is an educational overview, not legal advice.
