Whether an affirmative good faith defense denying damages to the victims of First Amendment wrongdoing is faithful to the language and purpose of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or to the principles of 'equality and fairness' to all the parties involved?

QUESTION PRESENTED Petitioners are current and former public employees in the States of California and Oregon who exercised their First Amendment right not to join a union. Despite petitioners not being union members, their respective public employers seized portions of their wages and, without their affirmative consent, transferred that money to the respondent unions. This practice was invalidated in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, 1388. Ct. 2448, 2486 (2018), since “publicsector agency-shop arrangements violate the First Amendment, and Abood [v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209 (1977)] erred in concluding otherwise.” Janus, 138 S. Ct. at 2478. Petitioners brought lawsuits, some as class actions, for refunds of the “agency fees” illegally taken from them and other nonmember employees for decades when they were “wrongly denied First Amendment rights,” id., but limited the requested refunds to the two-year statute of limitations period. The Ninth Circuit rejected petitioners’ claims and allowed respondent unions to keep all their ill-gotten gains because “private parties may invoke an affirmative defense of good faith to retrospective monetary liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, where they acted in direct reliance on then-binding Supreme Court precedent and presumptively-valid state law.” Danielson v. Inslee, 945 F.3d 1096, 1097 (9th Cir. 2019), cert. den., 141 S. Ct. 1265 (2021) (App. I (App. 54-77)). ii The question presented is: Whether an affirmative good faith defense denying damages to the victims of First Amendment wrongdoing is faithful to the language and purpose of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 or to the principles of “equality and fairness” to all the parties involved?