Federal Tort Claims Act

“ Apart from any rights which may arise under the Fourth Amendment, Congress has not created a cause of action for abuse of the subpoena power by a federal officer, at least where the subpoena was never given coercive effect. No claim is made that the Federal Tort Claims Act reaches that far. ”

“ While the area of liability is circumscribed by certain provisions of the Federal Tort Claims Act, see 28 U.S.C. § 2680, 28 U.S.C.A. § 2680, all Government activity is inescapably 'uniquely governmental' in that it is performed by the Government. ”

“ Local law must be pleaded since the Federal Tort Claims Act permits suit only 'where the United States, if a private person, would be liable * * * in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred.' 60 Stat. ”

“ The ease of application inherent in the rule urged by American lends a certain attractiveness, but we are bound to operate within the framework of the words chosen by Congress and not to question the wisdom of the latter in the process of construction. We conclude that Congress has, in the Tort Claims Act, enacted a rule which requires federal courts, in multistate tort actions, to look in the first instance to the law of the place where the acts of negligence took place. ”

“ Finally, the need to vault the verbal threshold is not limited to false arrest or false imprisonment claims; the Act makes no such distinctions and, instead, treats all torts similarly. The clear terms of the Tort Claims Act [p165] require that all claims--including those for false arrest and false imprison-ment--must vault the verbal threshold in order to be cognizable.
IV. We turn, then, to the issue certified on plaintiff's cross-petition: is good faith a defense available in a § 1983 Federal Civil Rights Act claim for false arrest and excessive force. ”

“ Since the Government is by the very statute made liable on a different basis than a private individual and will in every case pay a different amount than would a private individual, why does it offend the philosophy of the Act to make the Government liable for more than a private individual would pay? Thus, while it is true that in general the Tort Claims Act makes the United States pro tanto a private defendant, the very purpose of § 2674 (2) was to prevent this assimilation in States where recovery is punitive. ”

“ The unwisdom of extending federal criminal jurisdiction into areas of conduct conventionally punished by state penal law is perhaps more obvious than that of extending federal civil jurisdiction into the traditional realm of state tort law. But the latter, too, presents its problems of policy appropriately left to Congress. Suppose that a state legislature or the highest court of a State should determine that within its territorial limits no damages should be recovered in tort for pain and suffering, or for mental anguish, or that no punitive damages should be recoverable. ”

“ Congress should develop an administrative or quasi-judicial remedy against the government itself to afford compensation and restitution for persons whose Fourth Amendment rights have been violated. The venerable doctrine of respondeat superior in our tort law provides an entirely appropriate conceptual basis for this remedy. If, for exemple, a security guard privately employed by a department store commits an assault or other tort on a customer such as an improper search, the victim has a simple and obvious remedy-an action for money damages against the guard's employer, the department store. ”

“ The Government insists that each act or omission upon which the charge of negligence is predicated-the decisions as to discontinuing the investigation of hazards, bagging at high temperature, use of paperbagging material, absence of labeling and warning-involved a conscious weighing of expediency against caution and were therefore within the immunity for discretionary acts provided by the Tort Claims Act. ”

“ While we do not condone carelessness by government employees in gathering and promulgating such information, neither can we justifiably ignore the plain words Congress has used in limiting the scope of the Government's tort liability. [26]
It follows that respondents' claim is one 'arising out of * * *misrepresentation,' within the meaning of § 2680 (h) , and hence is not actionable against the Government under the Tort Claims Act. ”

“ Harry A. Margolis & Robert Novack, Claims Against Public Entities, Introduction, at ix (2001) . What [p10] emerged is the general rule that public entities are immune from tort liability unless there is a specific statutory provision imposing liability. Collins v. Union County Jail, 150 N.J. 407, 413, 696 A.2d 625 (1997) . The Tort Claims Act further limits recovery for pain and suffering damages to cases involving "permanent loss of a bodily function, permanent disfigurement or dismemberment where the medical treatment expenses are in excess of $ 3,600.00." ”

“ Manifestly the applicability of the section in an action for damages cannot be made to turn upon the actual availability or unavailability of a state-law remedy for each individual plaintiff's situation. Prosecution to adverse judgment of a state-court damage claim cannot be made prerequisite to § 1979 relief. In the first place, such a requirement would effectively nullify § 1979 as a vehicle for recovering damages. [72] In the second place, the conclusion that police activity which violates state law is not 'under color' of state law does not turn upon the existence of a state tort remedy. ”

“ That the act of Congress does provide for the removal of criminal prosecutions for offences against the State laws, when there arises in them the claim of the Federal right or authority, is too plain to admit of denial. Such is its positive language, and it is not to be argued away by presenting the supposed incongruity of administering State criminal laws by other courts than those established by the State. It has been strenuously urged that murder within a State is not made a crime by any act of Congress, and that it is an offence against the peace and dignity of the State alone. ”

“ Except as specifically provided by the General Assembly in a State Tort Claims Act, all officers and employees of the state or its departments and agencies may be subject to suit and may be liable for injuries and damages caused by the negligent performance of, or negligent failure to perform, their ministerial functions and may be liable for injuries and damages if they act with actual malice or with actual intent to cause injury in the performance of their official functions. ”

“ Where a party becomes responsible to the public, by undertaking a public duty, he is liable, though the injury may have arisen from the negligence of his servant or agent. So, in cases of public nuisances, whether the act was done by the party as a servant, or in any other capacity, you are liable to an action at the suit of any person who suffers. Those, however, are cases where the real ground of the liability is the public duty, or the commission of the public nuisance. There is also a class of cases in which the law permits a contract to be turned into a tort ”

“ The doctrine of civil conspiracy extends liability for a tort, here the deprivation of constitutional rights, to persons other than the actual wrongdoer, W. Prosser, The Law of Torts § 46 at 293 (4th ed. 1971) , but it is the acts causing damage to the plaintiff that give rise to liability for damages, not the conspiracy itself. "The damage for which recovery may be had in a civil action is not the conspiracy [*243] itself but the injury to the plaintiff produced by specific overt acts. ”

“ The Fifth Amendment forbids the Federal Government and the agents through which it acts-courts, grand juries, prosecutors, marshals or other officers-to use physical torture, psychological pressure, threats of fines, imprisonment or prosecution, or other governmental pressure to force a person to testify against himself. And if the Federal Government does extract incriminating testimony, as the Court has held it may in compelling gamblers to confess, the immunity provided by the Amendment should at the very least prevent the use of such testimony in any court, federal or state. ”

“ This is a very different case from New York Times, where the alleged libel concerned not an identified small group responsible for the running of a particular public enterprise, but a criticism of 'the police' generally in the discharge of their duties. It seems manifest that in instructing the jury as to a 'small group,' the trial judge was not allowing the plaintiff to transform impersonal governmental criticism into an individual cause of action, but was simply referring to this traditional tort doctrine that more than one person can be libeled by the same statement. ”

“ In marked contrast, the concept of "punitive damages" is deeply rooted in the common law.
An examination of the nature of the exceptions in § 2680 further demonstrates that those limitations serve a qualitatively different purpose than § 2674's bar on "punitive damages." The § 2680 exceptions are designed to protect certain important governmental functions and prerogatives from disruption. They mark "the boundary between Congress' willingness to impose tort liability upon the United States and its desire to protect certain governmental activities from exposure to suit by private individuals." ”

“ The United States has not consented to be sued for torts, and therefore it cannot be said that in a legal sense the United States has been guilty of a tort. For a tort is a tort in a legal sense only because the law has made it so. ”

“ Rather, it recognizes the freedom of the States to fashion their own laws of torts in their own way under no threat of federal intervention save where state law makes determinative of a plaintiff's rights the particular circumstance that defendants are acting by state authority. Section 1979 was not designed to cure and level all the possible imperfections of local common-law doctrines, but to provide for the case of the defendant who can claim that some particular dispensation of state authority immunizes him from the ordinary processes of the law. ”

“ The Constitution standing alone without more does not create a paramount unchangeable liability to an action of tort on the part of all persons who may take part in enforcing a state law that it invalidates. ”

“ Any injury inflicted by one person upon the person or property of another, which is not a breach of contract, is a tort. Tort is the French word for private wrong. If A carelessly drives his automobile into B's wagon, he commits a tort. If A carelessly drives his horse over B's field, he commits a tort. If A wrongfully strikes B, he commits a tort. Torts and crimes frequently over-lap. The same act may constitute a tort and a crime. If A drives his automobile faster than the laws of the state or city permit, and while so doing runs over and injures B, he commits both a tort and a crime. ”