Wild Willpower's Justice Reform Plan:
Fifth Reform—Abolish Government Immunity Doctrines
"A Government of Laws, Not of Men."
By Sondra Wilson | Updated August 4, 2026
Government should not be permitted to exercise power through its officials, accept the benefits of their work, and then disappear behind immunity when that power causes unlawful harm.
Wild Willpower proposes abolishing Iowa-controlled government-immunity doctrines that block injured citizens from obtaining due process, presenting evidence, and having disputed facts decided by a jury.
The replacement principle is straightforward:
When a person acting through governmental authority causes unlawful harm, the injured citizen must have a clear, affordable path to sue the responsible governmental body, identify the individual actors involved, and obtain a decision upon the facts and law.
Immunity should not end the case before the evidence is heard.
It should not replace factual review.
It should not prevent a jury from determining what happened merely because the alleged wrongdoer exercised governmental power.
Popular Sovereignty: Iowa’s Constitutional Path to Reform
Iowa does not have to remain resigned to a system in which government creates the injury, controls the records, supplies the defense, invokes immunity, and leaves the injured citizen without a meaningful remedy.
The Iowa Constitution begins with a principle more fundamental than any judicially developed immunity doctrine:
“All political power is inherent in the people.”
Government exists for the people’s “protection, security, and benefit,” and the people retain the right “at all times, to alter or reform the same, whenever the public good may require it.” Iowa Const. art. I, § 2.
That promise is not decorative.
Iowa’s governmental institutions are not the permanent property of judges, attorneys, political parties, agencies, or officeholders. They are public structures created to serve the people. When doctrines developed within those institutions prevent government from answering for unlawful exercises of government power, the people possess the constitutional authority to reform the system.
A valid law enacted within Iowa’s constitutional authority becomes governing law. Courts must apply that law rather than continue enforcing incompatible state common-law doctrines merely because those doctrines appeared in earlier judicial decisions.
Through popular sovereignty, Iowans can establish a clear rule:
Governmental power carries governmental responsibility.
The Present System Creates Layered Confusion
Under the present system, an injured person may be expected to determine:
- whether the proper defendant is the State, a county, a city, an agency, or an individual official;
- whether the official must be sued in an official capacity, an individual capacity, or both;
- whether the person is technically an employee, officer, agent, contractor, appointee, or some other governmental actor;
- whether the alleged conduct occurred within the scope of governmental duties;
- whether a special notice or administrative claim is required;
- where and how each defendant must be served;
- which immunity doctrine may be asserted;
- and whether a remedy survives after those doctrines are applied.
Those distinctions may be familiar to attorneys. They are not reasonably understandable to most citizens encountering the justice system for the first time.
A person may know exactly who caused the harm and still lose the case because the wrong legal capacity was written after a defendant’s name, the incorrect governmental entity was selected, or every individual actor was not separately served.
That is not meaningful access to justice.
It is layered procedural confusion standing between an injury and a remedy.
One Governmental Claim—Not a Maze of Defendants
Wild Willpower proposes a simpler and more accountable structure.
When unlawful harm is allegedly caused through governmental authority, the injured person should be able to:
- name the responsible State or governmental body as a defendant;
- identify the officials, employees, agents, contractors, appointees, or other governmental actors whose conduct is at issue;
- serve process through a designated governmental office;
- obtain the relevant government records through discovery;
- present evidence concerning what occurred;
- and receive a judicial or jury determination of responsibility.
The citizen should not be required to finance separate service upon numerous officials merely to preserve the possibility that one of several complicated capacity classifications may later prove correct.
This would substantially reduce the cost of beginning a case. It would also prevent government from defeating potentially valid claims through technical arguments about which public actor was sued in which capacity before the underlying evidence has been examined.
The courthouse should not function like a guessing game in which an injured citizen must select the correct defendant, capacity, doctrine, and service method before being allowed to ask what the government did.
Governmental Responsibility Through Respondeat Superior
The reform would apply a clear form of governmental responsibility based upon the principle of respondeat superior: when people act through a larger institution and within the work entrusted to them, the institution answers for the resulting conduct.
Iowa law already recognizes respondeat-superior principles in other settings, including statutory provisions addressing employer liability for conduct occurring within the course and scope of employment.
Government should not receive a broader escape from responsibility than private institutions receive.
Under Wild Willpower’s proposal:
- conduct undertaken within the lawful or apparent scope of governmental work would create a path to liability against the responsible governmental body;
- the government could identify whether it contends that an actor departed from assigned duties or lawful authority;
- the parties could obtain evidence concerning training, supervision, policies, instructions, authority, and scope of duties;
- and the court or jury could determine where legal responsibility belongs.
The government should not be permitted to use an official’s authority when it benefits the State, then characterize the same person as legally disconnected from the State when that authority causes harm.
If the government contends that the person acted outside the scope of official authority, that should be a question resolved through evidence—not an immunity label imposed before meaningful factual development.
Service Through the Government
Service of process should be simple, centralized, and affordable.
A citizen alleging harm by numerous government actors should not have to locate and separately serve every official, employee, agent, contractor, or officeholder before obtaining access to the facts.
Under this proposal, service upon the designated governmental office would provide notice to the governmental body and to the identified actors whose conduct is challenged. The government would then be responsible for notifying those persons, preserving relevant records, identifying their employment or agency relationships, and disclosing which actors it contends were acting within or outside the scope of governmental authority.
This would accomplish the legitimate purpose of service—fair notice—without turning service expenses and technical classifications into barriers to redress.
Government already possesses the employment files, organizational records, addresses, chains of command, contracts, and internal information needed to identify its own personnel.
The injured citizen should not bear the cost of reconstructing the government’s internal structure merely to enter the courthouse.
Due Process Before Immunity
The first question in a government-misconduct case should not be:
“How can the government avoid being sued?”
It should be:
“What happened, what law governed the conduct, and who is responsible?”
Immunity doctrines can presently prevent a case from reaching those questions. A judge may dismiss the action before discovery, before witnesses testify, before disputed records are examined, and before a jury hears the evidence.
The result is not a finding that the alleged misconduct did not occur.
It is a ruling that, even if legally sufficient allegations were made, the selected immunity doctrine prevents the requested remedy.
Wild Willpower’s proposal would reverse that order of priorities.
Evidence should come before insulation.
Responsibility should come before immunity.
Due process should come before dismissal.
The Right to Trial by Jury Shall Remain Inviolate
The Iowa Constitution states:
“The right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate.”
It also provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Iowa Const. art. I, § 9.
A jury is not entitled to disregard governing law. But the General Assembly and the people of Iowa can change Iowa law so that immunity no longer prevents juries from reaching factual disputes that would otherwise be triable.
When material facts are genuinely disputed—what an official did, why it was done, what authority existed, what records were created, whether instructions were followed, and what injuries resulted—those questions should not disappear behind a doctrine that ends the case before factual adjudication.
A legal system cannot call the right to jury trial “inviolate” while preserving state doctrines that make the jury unreachable whenever government is accused of serious wrongdoing.
The jury belongs to the people.
It is one of the principal institutions through which ordinary citizens participate directly in the administration of justice.
My Firsthand Experience With Immunity
In Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa, I invoked respondeat superior and argued that the State should answer for wrongful conduct performed through state authority.
The State responded:
“Based on the contents of Plaintiff’s Amended Petition and as a matter of law, Judge Van Marel—and, by virtue, the State—is absolutely immune from Plaintiff’s claims.”
Defendant State of Iowa’s Motion to Dismiss Amended Petition, filed July 26, 2024; D0031, p. 14.
I answered:
“While judges in fact have been granted absolute immunity by the state, the State is not, as the State argued, ‘by virtue’, also immune. If the State grants immunity to Judges—even for malicious acts, the State in such cases thereby assumes liability for such malicious acts…. In fact, ‘by virtue’ the state is liable, for it would be without virtue to deny redress to individuals who are harmed by rights violations and crimes performed by judges.”
Plaintiff’s Omnibus Resistance and Motions, filed August 5, 2024; D0032, pp. 35–36.
The district court later described my position as arguing that “the state should assume the liability of judicial officers who are immune from civil liability.” It nevertheless accepted the State’s immunity arguments and dismissed the claims with prejudice.
I requested a jury trial because central factual questions remained disputed.
The jury never heard them.
The claims ended upon threshold legal doctrines before ordinary citizens could examine the underlying record, assess credibility, or determine what occurred.
That sequence illustrates the central problem with government immunity: it does not merely protect an official from personal payment. It can prevent the facts from being publicly adjudicated at all.
Immunity Must Not Flow in Every Direction
If an individual official is immune, and the State is also immune “by virtue” of the official’s immunity, responsibility disappears in every direction.
The individual cannot be held liable.
The government cannot be held liable.
The jury cannot hear the evidence.
The injured person receives no remedy.
There is nothing virtuous about that arrangement.
Immunity should not function as a legal vacuum into which governmental responsibility disappears.
Iowa should adopt the opposite rule:
When government protects an individual actor from personal liability for conduct performed through governmental authority, the responsible governmental body must remain answerable for the injury.
That principle would preserve institutional continuity while ensuring that immunity allocates responsibility rather than extinguishing it.
Responsibility Creates Prevention
Governmental liability would do more than compensate people after they are harmed. It would create an institutional incentive to prevent harm before it occurs.
When the State bears legal and financial responsibility for misconduct performed through governmental authority, it has stronger reasons to:
- hire qualified personnel;
- provide accurate legal and constitutional training;
- supervise employees and agents;
- preserve records;
- investigate credible complaints;
- correct unlawful practices;
- remove officials who repeatedly abuse authority;
- and establish safeguards against foreseeable violations.
Under broad immunity, the cost of misconduct may fall almost entirely upon the injured citizen.
Under governmental responsibility, the institution that selected, trained, empowered, supervised, and retained the actor has an incentive to prevent the injury.
Government should not be rewarded for inadequate training, negligent supervision, institutional indifference, or the preservation of abusive practices.
Good-Faith Public Service Does Not Require Governmental Impunity
Abolishing immunity doctrines does not mean that every disagreement with a government decision becomes a successful lawsuit.
A plaintiff would still have to establish:
- a legally recognized duty or right;
- actionable conduct;
- causation;
- injury;
- jurisdiction;
- compliance with applicable procedural requirements;
- and entitlement to a lawful remedy.
Government defendants would still be able to contest the allegations, present evidence, dispute causation, assert that the conduct was lawful, challenge damages, and seek judgment when the evidence is legally insufficient.
Judges would still decide questions of law.
Juries would still decide appropriate disputed questions of fact.
Appellate courts would still review legal error.
What would change is the availability of immunity as a threshold escape from factual and legal accountability.
The government would win when the law and evidence support the government—not merely because the identity of the defendant triggers a doctrine that prevents the case from being heard.
Public Officials Are Not Above the Law
Public officials exercise powers ordinary citizens do not possess.
They can arrest, prosecute, regulate, license, investigate, tax, condemn property, terminate benefits, maintain official records, decide legal rights, and use public resources in ways capable of profoundly affecting another person’s life.
Greater power must bring greater accountability.
Government cannot credibly insist that ordinary citizens are presumed to know and obey the law while allowing those who wield public authority to escape civil accountability through doctrines unavailable to the public.
A government of laws cannot mean one body of law for the governed and another for those who govern.
John Adams described republican government as “a government of laws, not of men.” Chief Justice John Marshall later connected that principle to the necessity of a remedy when a legal right is violated.
Wild Willpower’s proposal gives that principle practical force:
The legality of governmental conduct should be determined by law and evidence—not by the status, title, profession, or institutional protection of the person who exercised the power.
Enact the Remedy in Law
This reform should not end with a commission report or a recommendation that courts voluntarily reconsider doctrines they created and preserved.
The proposal is to enact a clear statutory remedy—and, where necessary, pursue constitutional reform—abolishing Iowa-controlled immunity doctrines that prevent meaningful redress for governmental wrongdoing.
The legislation should:
- create an express cause of action against the State and other Iowa governmental bodies for unlawful harm caused through governmental authority;
- permit plaintiffs to identify responsible individuals without requiring separate individual-capacity lawsuits as the only possible route to relief;
- establish centralized and affordable service through the responsible governmental body;
- apply governmental responsibility and respondeat-superior principles to employees, officials, officers, agents, contractors, appointees, and others exercising delegated public authority;
- require government to disclose whether it contends each identified actor acted within or outside the scope of governmental authority;
- prevent Iowa-controlled immunity doctrines from defeating the cause of action before appropriate factual development;
- preserve access to discovery, judicial review, and jury trial where legally triable factual disputes exist;
- provide effective damages, declaratory relief, injunctive relief, correction of government records, and other remedies appropriate to the injury;
- require preservation of relevant government records once misconduct is reported or litigation is reasonably foreseeable;
- and prohibit the government from using immunity to leave an injured person without any responsible defendant.
Once such a law is validly enacted, the legal question changes.
A court would no longer ask whether an older Iowa immunity doctrine extinguishes the claim. It would apply the remedy created by the people’s elected representatives.
The rule would be written.
The cause of action would exist.
The proper governmental defendant would be identified.
Service would be simplified.
The evidence could be obtained.
Due process could proceed.
The People May Reform Their Government
Immunity doctrines are not laws of nature.
They are legal rules developed, expanded, interpreted, and preserved by human institutions.
Human institutions can be reformed.
Professional familiarity with a doctrine is not democratic consent to it. Longevity does not make a doctrine just. Repetition does not make it constitutionally sacred. And institutional convenience does not outweigh the right of the people to demand a government accountable under law.
Iowa’s Constitution does not say that political power is inherent in the judiciary, the executive branch, the General Assembly, or the legal profession.
It says that political power is inherent in the people.
When government-immunity doctrines prevent serious allegations from reaching evidence, due process, and a jury, Iowans possess the authority—and the responsibility—to replace those doctrines with a system of governmental accountability.
The principle is simple:
Government must obey the law. Government must answer when it violates the law. And no person harmed through governmental power should be denied a meaningful path to redress merely because the wrongdoer served the government.
That is what it means to establish a government of laws, not of men.
Popular Sovereignty:
Iowa’s Constitutional Path to Reform
Iowa does not have to remain resigned to this system.
The Iowa Constitution begins from a principle more fundamental than any judicially created immunity doctrine: “All political power is inherent in the people.” Government exists for the people’s “protection, security, and benefit,” and the people retain the right “at all times, to alter or reform the same, whenever the public good may require it.” Iowa Const. art. I, § 2.
That promise is not decorative language. It means Iowa’s governmental institutions are not the permanent property of judges, attorneys, political parties, or officeholders. They are public structures created to serve the people, and they may be reformed when they cease to do so.
Iowa is still a relatively young state within a relatively young nation. This is not the time to fall asleep at the wheel or surrender to the belief that institutional injustice is too entrenched to repair. Iowa is a state of farmers, builders, engineers, veterans, service members, innovators, and working people accustomed to confronting difficult problems. Generations before us preserved an opportunity for self-government that many people throughout history never possessed—and for which many sacrificed their lives.
The question is therefore not whether Iowans should act when a public institution becomes inaccessible or unaccountable. The question is how we will act responsibly, constitutionally, and effectively.
That principle is one reason justice reform became central to my gubernatorial platform.
A Public Review of Government Immunity Doctrines
As governor, I will initiate a public, evidence-based review of Iowa’s immunity doctrines and work with the General Assembly and the people of Iowa to establish meaningful remedies for malicious, corrupt, knowingly unconstitutional, or deliberately abusive exercises of governmental power—while preserving necessary protections for good-faith judicial decision-making.
That review would examine not only judicial immunity, but judicial-process immunity, absolute privilege, procedural precedents, barriers confronting self-represented litigants, and accountability mechanisms that may no longer serve the public good. It would invite testimony from judges and attorneys—but also from self-represented litigants, crime victims, civil-rights complainants, constitutional scholars, veterans, workers, farmers, small-business owners, and other Iowans whose experience with the justice system rarely becomes part of the rulemaking record.
The purpose would not be to place pending cases before a political tribunal or subject judges to retaliation whenever someone dislikes a ruling. It would be to place the doctrines themselves before the public: where they came from, whom they protect, what harms they prevent, what harms they permit, and whether their present scope is compatible with the constitutional promise that government exists for the people’s protection, security, and benefit.
The review should identify which protections are genuinely necessary for decisional independence and which doctrines have grown so broad that they deny remedies even where malicious, corrupt, or knowingly unconstitutional conduct is alleged. Its recommendations could be submitted to the General Assembly for prospective legislation, referred to the judiciary for court-rule reform, or—where constitutional limitations require it—developed into a proposed constitutional amendment for consideration by the people.
What a Governor—and Iowa Voters—Can Actually Change
Iowa voters cannot directly erase a judicial precedent through a simple statewide vote. Under Iowa’s constitutional amendment process, a proposed amendment ordinarily must be approved by two successive General Assemblies before being submitted to the electorate for ratification. The General Assembly may also address some state-law doctrines through legislation, subject to constitutional review and the separation of powers. A governor cannot unilaterally abolish precedent, and Iowa cannot eliminate immunities imposed by controlling federal law merely by changing state law.
But those limitations do not make the governor powerless, and they do not make the people irrelevant. A governor can expose the issue, convene a credible public process, require competing arguments to be presented in language ordinary citizens can understand, propose legislation, recommend constitutional reform, and insist that doctrines affecting the public no longer remain buried within legal research systems accessible mainly to professionals.
Accountability Without Destroying Judicial Independence
Reform need not mean imposing personal liability every time a judge is reversed. Ordinary legal error, good-faith interpretation, and unpopular but lawful decisions require substantial protection. A carefully designed system could use demanding evidentiary thresholds, independent screening, declaratory or equitable relief, transparent disciplinary reporting, and narrowly defined remedies for conduct proven to be malicious, corrupt, knowingly unconstitutional, deliberately abusive, or wholly outside legitimate judicial authority.
But reform cannot leave the injured citizen without any remedy at all.
In Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa, I invoked the doctrine of respondeat superior. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it as the doctrine holding an employer or principal liable for wrongful acts committed by an employee or agent within the scope of employment or agency. [21] My later motion to reconsider described the State as the principal and the officials exercising state authority as its agents.
The doctrine does not mean that an employer is responsible for every private act of an employee. “Scope of employment” generally concerns conduct undertaken in furtherance of the employer’s business or within the duties assigned to the employee. Conduct entirely outside that scope ordinarily presents a different question.
The State nevertheless argued that judicial immunity extended beyond the individual judge:
“Based on the contents of Plaintiff’s Amended Petition and as a matter of law, Judge Van Marel—and, by virtue, the State—is absolutely immune from Plaintiff’s claims.”
Defendant State of Iowa’s Motion to Dismiss Amended Petition, filed July 26, 2024; D0031, p. 14.
I answered that argument directly:
“While judges in fact have been granted absolute immunity by the state, the State is not, as the State argued, ‘by virtue’, also immune. If the State grants immunity to Judges—even for malicious acts, the State in such cases thereby assumes liability for such malicious acts…. In fact, ‘by virtue’ the state is liable, for it would be without virtue to deny redress to individuals who are harmed by rights violations and crimes performed by judges.”
Plaintiff’s Omnibus Resistance and Motions, filed August 5, 2024; D0032, pp. 35–36.
The district court later characterized one of my positions as the argument that “the state should assume the liability of judicial officers who are immune from civil liability,” but concluded that the State’s immunity arguments were supported by legal authority and dismissed the claims with prejudice.
I requested a jury trial because central factual questions remained disputed. But the claims were dismissed on threshold legal grounds before a jury could examine the underlying record. A jury could not simply disregard controlling immunity doctrine; that doctrine was for the court to address. My concern is that its application ended the case before ordinary citizens could determine what occurred, whether the evidence supported my allegations, and what injuries resulted.
That sequence matters democratically. When judicially developed doctrines prevent a jury from ever reaching the facts, the doctrines themselves may remain practically invisible to the public. There is no public trial, little media attention, and no citizen verdict—only a legal ruling that the alleged conduct cannot produce the requested remedy.
The question is not whether jurors should disregard law. It is whether Iowa’s law has become so protective of governmental authority that citizens are systematically prevented from examining serious allegations through the institution the Iowa Constitution describes as inviolate.
This leaves a fundamental problem. If the judge is immune because Iowa has chosen to protect decisional independence, and the State is then declared immune “by virtue” of the judge’s immunity, the person allegedly harmed can be left without any defendant from whom redress may be obtained.
There is nothing virtuous about immunity flowing in every direction while accountability disappears.
Iowa should adopt a clear principle: when the law forecloses personal liability against the official exercising governmental power, it must preserve an effective remedy against the governmental body responsible for that exercise of power. Otherwise, immunity ceases to allocate responsibility and instead extinguishes it.
That would not make the State liable whenever a litigant disagrees with a ruling or whenever an appellate court reverses a judge. Liability could require an independently reviewed and demanding showing of malicious, corrupt, knowingly unconstitutional, deliberately abusive, or wholly unauthorized conduct.
But once that high threshold is met, someone must answer for the injury.