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Athul Acharya ’14 originally envisioned himself in a tech career. Prior to enrolling at Duke Law School he had earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Rochester and a master’s in computer science from Purdue University, then worked as a software engineer at Intel.

But seeking greater meaning in his work, within three years Acharya had quit his job to enter law school, after which he completed two federal clerkships and worked at two law firms. There he began to forge a path in impact litigation, leading to the creation, in May 2021, of an organization dedicated to reforming the legal rules that shield public servants and the government accused of wrongdoing from civil lawsuits.

As executive director of Portland, Oregon-based Public Accountability, Acharya litigates civil rights appeals involving doctrines such as qualified immunity, which largely protects local law enforcement from being sued, and Bivens, which provides individuals with a right of action against federal officers. In the past two years he has represented and won judgments for protestors who have been pepper-sprayed, journalists who have been banned from reporting on protests, and people who have been beaten and sexually assaulted in prison, among others.

Acharya spoke with Duke Law about how he came up with the idea to start Public Accountability, and how the pandemic and the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer prompted him to make the leap.

Where did the vision to found your organization come from?

The idea for Public Accountability began to take root in 2018 or so when I decided that I wanted to shift from patent law to civil rights. I wanted to do something different that hadn't been done before, and I had the idea that an organization that was laser-focused on anti-accountability doctrines, like qualified immunity, was needed and was a niche that wasn’t filled already. Looking around and surveying the landscape of civil rights litigation nonprofits, most of them, like the ACLU, take a generalist approach to civil rights. No one really was laser-focused on these specific threshold doctrines that keep meritorious cases from being heard on their merits.

The genesis of the idea was probably way back in [Alston & Bird Professor of Law] Ernest Young’s federal courts class. His final exam had an essay question, ‘If you could change one federal court doctrine, which one and why?’ And I picked state sovereign immunity, which is not the main issue that we work on. Mostly we work on qualified immunity, but it's definitely in the ballpark. So I think the seed was planted there.

And then in 2020, with the George Floyd protests, qualified immunity really entered the mainstream. In 2019, you could ask a room full of lawyers if they'd heard of qualified immunity and most hands would not have gone up. Now I can ask a room full of non-lawyer activists if they’ve heard of it and most of the hands will go up. Once I started seeing TikTok memes about qualified immunity I realized that the time was now or never.

How did the protests and the pandemic affect your decision to leave your job and launch it?

During the pandemic, while I was at my last law firm, I moved to Portland for family reasons. And I moved here the night before the police started kettling [corralling] and tear-gassing protestors. Basically, all hell broke loose. I found a class of journalists as plaintiffs, because police had been pummeling them for reporting on their misconduct, and I created a relationship with the ACLU of Oregon and came up with a legal theory that would allow journalists to remain at the scene of a protest and report, even after police declared unlawful assembly for protestors. We brought the case and won a preliminary injunction in the district court.

Then the Trump administration showed up in July and federal agents rained tear gas on downtown Portland. So we joined them to the case and fought a very bitter legal battle to get a preliminary injunction against them. We won it, and then we defended that on appeal and won that too. I think that was what really made it concrete for me, that fighting these law enforcement abuses was what I wanted to do with my career.

How did your interest in civil rights work emerge?

When I was a software engineer at Intel I realized that I needed values in my work. That was why I went to law school. It’s not like I needed a JD. I had a career, it was lucrative, and I incurred a lot of opportunity costs to go to law school and do something different. At that time, the values that I cared most about were tech freedom issues like net neutrality and patent trolls and free speech on the internet. I got out of law school and I clerked and then I did patent litigation for a couple of years. It was good, but patent litigation can be very rote on the law side and I felt my law muscles atrophying so I wanted to do something else.

I think I developed my interest in civil rights and police misconduct and prison guard misconduct in law school. Again, in Federal Courts a lot of cases involve those issues, those factual setups. So that’s probably where it came from.

Did you ever think you might be an entrepreneur, rather than working at a tech company or law firm?

I am someone who’s always needed a lot of autonomy at work, but unlike a lot of my friends from computer science, I never thought that I would go to a startup. I just figured I’d make my way in whatever company I wound up at, like Google or something. But working as a lawyer, I found myself frustrated when I thought a case needed to be briefed one way, and it ended up being briefed and argued a different way. There’s a dynamic that is sort of unavoidable in big law firms where the partner who argues the case never knows as much about the case as the associate who briefed it. But of course the client wants the partner to argue. So apart from the substantive stuff, like I care about civil rights and want to do something to improve that in this country, there was also a sort of mechanical dissatisfaction with how I was able to be a lawyer in these firms. So that was definitely part of my decision to start Public Accountability.

Do you utilize your technology background in your practice? You got some media attention last year for a moot app you developed to help prepare for oral arguments.

Having the tech background allows me to make use of existing tools really well. For example, I have in a folder every qualified immunity case that comes up because I read them all for my newsletter, and there’s a tool called PDF GREP that most lawyers have probably never heard of. Ditto for just about anyone who’s not pretty deep in the tech field. But it's a really useful way of searching these PDFs wholesale very quickly, and in ways that sometimes Westlaw is not as good at. It's a small example, but there are a lot of ways in which having the tech background makes me a little bit more efficient in my day-to-day lawyering.

I think the biggest pain point in technology for every law firm is that there aren’t many good document management systems, and even the good ones are pretty bad. So this is another place where my tech background is useful. Software engineering has basically the same problem of version control across multiple people working on a project. I found a service called Simul that has developed a much more robust type of version control system for Word documents. It’s not particularly geared towards big law firms but it’s perfect for me.

What cases are you working on now?

I just finished a logjam of cases that piled up during paternity leave – two arguments and a brief comprising a pretty wide range of subjects, including an anti-SLAPP case in which directors of a local school board sued parents for organizing against them, a protest excessive-force case, and a Bivens case in the Second Circuit. Coming up, I'm working with the Oregon Justice Resource Center on a lawsuit challenging Oregon's failure to adequately fund public defense, and then appealing a post-trial grant of qualified immunity that wiped out a million-dollar verdict. There’s no shortage of accountability work out there.