Qualified immunity, as it was developed in the early 1970s, was designed to prevent police officers from being held civilly liable for constitutional rights violations that were not “clearly established.” The rationale behind this formulation was based in pragmatism as much as justice; an officer should not be held accountable for violating a right that she did not know existed, but it also benefits the courts and police force by limiting the number and quality of claims an individual can make against officers. The words “clearly established” however, have become something of a Pandora’s Box, producing decisions in federal courts that defy a clear pattern. Specifically, the question of when a right becomes “clearly established” has dogged the Supreme Court. The impact of recent qualified immunity decisions creates a framework in which courts are permitted to rule on cases without determining if there is an established right. As a result, instead of creating a growing body of literature on what is and is not an established right, the development of constitutional jurisprudence stagnates. Further, the public-facing impacts of qualified immunity doctrine have seemingly ignored victims while providing dubious benefits to the communities and the judicial system. This paper examines the modern trends in the qualified immunity  doctrine which permit and encourage constitutional stagnation, and the harms created by qualified immunity and exacerbated by its modern interpretations. Its goal is to lay the foundation for a discussion of more radical solutions to the qualified immunity problem specifically, to ask if it is time to eliminate the doctrine altogether.