FAILURE TO SUPERVISE AS MUNICIPAL CUSTOM.

Recovering damages from municipalities has proven a vexing challenge for civil rights litigators. Scholars have demonstrated a range of doctrinal and practical challenges, chief among them the demands of the "policy or custom" standard imposed by the Supreme Court in Monell. In previous work, coauthor Leong has argued that the theory of municipal failure to supervise offers an underexplored and promising avenue for recovery. This Article offers an empirical examination of the claim that a municipality failed to supervise its employees as a means to establish policy or custom. It provides a novel and comprehensive survey of every failure-to-supervise case decided since 1980 in each of the twelve federal appellate circuits, exploring opportunities and challenges for litigants in each jurisdiction. In addition to providing an important resource for judges and litigators confronting the failure-to-supervise theory, it also highlights variation among (and occasionally within) jurisdictions and offers practical and concrete advice for successful litigation of such claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]