Whether the unconstitutionality of government officials' conduct is clearly established even absent binding precedent directly on point

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Respondents are prison officials who deliberately left Petitioner Trent Taylor naked for six days in two filthy cells; the first cell was covered from floor to ceiling in feces from previous residents, and in the second Petitioner had to sleep in a pool of sewage overflowing from a clogged drain. Petitioner brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 challenging Respondents’ conduct as violating the Eighth Amendment. The Fifth Circuit concluded that the substantial risk of harm Respondents imposed on Petitioner was “especially obvious” and therefore unconstitutional. But the court nonetheless granted qualified immunity to Respondents on the theory that, although prior circuit precedent recognized the unconstitutionality of forcing prisoners to live in human waste, those cases involved longer periods of confinement and therefore did not clearly establish a constitutional violation under these precise circumstances. The questions presented are: 1. When the unconstitutionality of government officials’ conduct is obvious, does that suffice to render the violation clearly established, as the Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have recognized in analogous cases, or must there also be binding precedent directly on point, as the Fifth Circuit held below? 2. Are government officials entitled to qualified immunity so long as there is no prior precedent recognizing the unconstitutionality of an identical fact pattern, as the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have held, or can prior precedent clearly establish a constitutional violation despite some factual variation, as the Third, ii Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have held? 3. Should the judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity, which is not justified by reference to the text of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or its common law backdrop and which has been demonstrated not to serve its policy goals, be narrowed or abolished?