What is the current state of the law on the Eighth Amendment's protections against unsanitary conditions of confinement?

We reject this constrained conception of the Eighth Amendment's protections against unsanitary conditions of confinement. A brief tour of the applicable case law, as ably canvassed by the district court, will aid our discussion. The Eighth Amendment "does not mandate comfortable prisons," Rhodes v. Chapman, 452 U.S. 337, 349 (1981), but prisons nevertheless "must provide humane conditions of confinement," Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 832 (1994). A claim under for violations of the Eighth Amendment requires (1) an "objectively, sufficiently serious . . . denial of the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities" and (2) a "sufficiently culpable state of mind" on the part of the responsible official. Id. at 834 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

Our most recent opinion in this area is Gaston v. Coughlin, 249 F.3d 156 (2d Cir. 2001), which reinstated an inmate's Eighth Amendment claim for exposure to human waste. In that case, the plaintiff had alleged that "on several days the area

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