Source: http://www.chanrobles.com/usa/us_supremecourt/515/417/case.php
Timestamp: 2017-11-17 17:22:24
Document Index: 705447704

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 2679', '§ 15', '§ 2680', '§ 2680', '§ 2680', '§ 2679', '§ 2679', '§ 2679', '§ 2679', '§ 2', '§ 2679', '§ 2679']

GINSBURG, J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II, and III, in which STEVENS, O'CONNOR, KENNEDY, and BREYER, JJ., joined, and an opinion with respect to Part IV, in which STEVENS, KENNEDY, and BREYER, JJ., joined. O'CONNOR, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, post, p. 437. SOUTER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which REHNQUIST, C.J., and SCALIA and THOMAS, JJ., joined, post, p. 438.
When a federal employee is sued for a wrongful or negligent act, the Federal Employees Liability Reform and Tortcralaw
Shortly before midnight on January 18, 1991, in Barranquilla, Colombia, a car driven by respondent Dirk A. Lamagno, a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), collided with petitioners' car. Petitioners, who are citizens of Colombia, allege that La-cralaw
"I, Richard Cullen, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, acting pursuant to the provisions of 28 U. S. C. § 2679, and by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Appendix to 28 C.F.R. § 15.3 (1991), hereby certify that I have investigated the circumstances of the incident upon which the plaintiff[s'] claim is based. On the basis of the information now available with respect to the allegations of the complaint, I hereby certify that defendant Dirk A. Lamagno was acting within the scope of his employment as an employee of the United States of America at the time of the incident giving rise to the above entitled action." App.I-2.cralaw
To keep their action against Lamagno alive, and to avoid the fatal consequences of unrecallable substitution of the United States as the party defendant, petitioners asked the District Court to review the certification. Petitioners maintained that Lamagno was acting outside the scope of his employment at the time of the accident; certification to the contrary, they argued, was groundless and untrustworthy. Following Circuit precedent, Johnson v. Carter, 983 F.2d 1316 (CA4) (en banc), cert. denied, 510 U. S. 812 (1993), the District Court held the certification unreviewable, substituted the United States for Lamagno, and dismissed peti-cralaw
4 The United States, in accord with petitioners, reads the Westfall Act to allow a plaintiff to challenge the Attorney General's scope-of-employment certification. We therefore invited Michael K. Kellogg to brief and argue this case, as amicus curiae, in support of the judgment below. 513 U. S. 1010 (1994). Mr. Kellogg accepted the appointment and has well fulfilled his assigned responsibility.cralaw
Accordingly, we have stated time and again that judicial review of executive action "will not be cut off unless there is persuasive reason to believe that such was the purpose of Congress." Abbott Laboratories, 387 U. S., at 140 (citingcralaw
When Congress wrote the Westfall Act, which covers federal employees generally and not just federal drivers, the legislators had one purpose firmly in mind. That purpose surely was not to make the Attorney General's delegate the final arbiter of "scope-of-employment" contests. Instead, Congress sought to override Westfall v. Erwin, 484 U. S. 292 (1988). In Westfall, we held that, to gain immunity from suit for a common-law tort, a federal employee would havecralaw
Construction of the Westfall Act as Lamagno urges-to deny to federal courts authority to review the Attorney General's scope-of-employment certification-would oblige us to attribute to Congress two highly anomalous commands. Not only would we have to accept that Congress, by its silence, authorized the Attorney General's delegate to make determinations of the kind at issue without any judicial check. At least equally perplexing, the proposed reading would cast Article III judges in the role of petty functionaries, persons required to enter as a court judgment an executive officer's decision, but stripped of capacity to evaluate independently whether the executive's decision is correct.cralaw
5 Several of the FTCA's 13 exceptions are for cases in which other compensatory regimes afford relief. Kosak v. United States, 465 U. S. 848, 858 (1984) (one rationale for exceptions is "not extending the coverage of the [FTCA] to suits for which adequate remedies were already available"). See, e. g., § 2680(c) (excluding "[a]ny claim arising in respect of the assessment or collection of any tax or customs duty"); § 2680(d) (excluding "[a]ny claim for which a remedy is provided by" the Public Vessels Act, "relating to claims or suits in admiralty against the United States"); § 2680(e) (excluding "[a]ny claim arising out of an act or omission of any employee of the Government in administering the provisions of" the Trading with the Enemy Act); 2 L. Jayson, Handling Federal Tort Claims: Administrative and Judicial Remedies 13-8, 13-25, 13-43 to 13-44 (1995) (explaining these exclusions as cases in which other remedies are available).cralaw
See In re Murchison, 349 U. S. 133, 136 (1955) ("[O]ur system of law has always endeavored to prevent even the probability of unfairness. To this end no man can be a judge in his own case and no man is permitted to try cases where he has an interest in the outcome."); Spencer v. Lapsley, 20 How. 264, 266 (1858) (recognizing statute accords with this maxim); see also Publius Syrus, Moral Sayings 51 (D. Lyman transl. 1856) ("No one should be judge in his own cause."); B. Pascal, Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules 182 (0. Wight transl. 1859) ("It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be acralaw
If Congress made the Attorney General's delegate sole judge, despite the apparent conflict of interest, then Congress correspondingly assigned to the federal court only rubber-stamp work. Upon certification in a case such as this one, the United States would automatically become the defendant and, just as automatically, the case would be dismissed. The key question presented-scope of employment-however contestable in fact, would receive no judicial audience. The court could do no more, and no less, than convert the executive's scarcely disinterested decision into a court judgment. This strange course becomes all the more surreal when one adds to the scene the absence of an obligation on the part of the Attorney General's delegate to conduct a fair proceeding, indeed, any proceeding. She need not give the plaintiff an opportunity to speak to the "scope" question, or even notice that she is considering the question. Nor need she give any explanation for her action.cralaw
"(2) Upon certification by the Attorney General that the defendant employee was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incident out of which the claim arose, any civil action or proceeding commenced upon such claim in a State court shall be removed without bond at any time before trial by the Attorney General to the district courtcralaw
"(3) In the event that the Attorney General has refused to certify scope of office or employment under this section, the employee may at any time before trial petition the court to find and certify that the employee was acting within the scope of his office or employment. Upon such certification by the court, such action or proceeding shall be deemed to be an action or proceeding brought against the United States under the provisions of this title and all references thereto, and the United States shall be substituted as the party defendant. A copy of the petition shall be served upon the United States in accordance with the provisions of Rule 4(d)(4) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In the event the petition is filed in a civil action or proceeding pending in a State court, the action or proceeding may be removed without bond by the Attorney General to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place in which it is pending. If, in considering the petition, the district court determines that the employee was not acting within the scope of his office or employment, the action or proceeding shall be remanded to the State court."cralaw
9Though "shall" generally means "must," legal writers sometimes use, or misuse, "shall" to mean "should," "will," or even "may." See D. Mellinkoff, Mellinkoff's Dictionary of American Legal Usage 402-403 (1992) ("shall" and "may" are "frequently treated as synonyms" and their mean-cralaw
The dissent, moreover, draws inconsistent inferences from congressional silence. Omission of language authorizing review of substitution, the dissent argues, forecloses review. See post, at 439-440, 443. But omission of language authorizing review of removal is not sufficient to foreclose review; rather, to achieve this purpose, the dissent says, Congress took the further step of adding language in § 2679(d)(2) making review "conclusiv[e] ... for purposes of removal." See post, at 444-445.cralaw
Treating the Attorney General's certification as conclusive for purposes of removal but not for purposes of substitution, amicus ultimately argues, "raise[s] a potentially serious Article III problem." Brief for Michael K. Kellogg as Amicus Curiae 29. If the certification is rejected, because the fed-cralaw
In adjudicating the scope-of-federal-employment question "at the very outset," the court inevitably will confront facts relevant to the alleged misconduct, matters that bear on the state tort claims against the employee. Cf. Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U. S. 715, 725 (1966) (approving exercise of pendent jurisdiction when federal and state claims have "a common nucleus of operative fact" and would "ordinarily becralaw
11 The dissent charges that for Congress to allow cases like this one to open and finish in federal court, when brought there by the local United States Attorney, "implies a jurisdictional tenacity," post, at 443, and allows losers always to win, post, at 442. Under the dissent's abstract and unrelenting logic, it is a jurisdictional flight for Congress to assign to federal courts tort actions in which there is a genuine issue of fact whether a federal employee acted within the scope of his federal employment. The dissent's solution for this discrete class of cases: plaintiffs always lose. For the above-stated reasons, we disagree. See also Goldberg-Ambrose, Protective Jurisdiction of the Federal Courts, 30 UCLA L. Rev. 542, 549 (1983) ("If [the legal relationships on which the plaintiff necessarily relies] are federally created, even in small part, the claim should be treated as one that arises under federal law within the meaning of article III, independent of any protective jurisdiction theory.").cralaw
Of course, I agree with the dissent, post, at 441, that we ordinarily should construe statutes to avoid serious constitutional questions, such as that discussed in Part IV of the Court's opinion, when it is fairly possible to do so. See United States v. X-Citement Video, Inc., 513 U. S. 64, 78 (1994); Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U. S. 173, 223-225 (1991) (O'CONNOR, J., dissenting). And I recognize that reversing the Court of Appeals' judgment in this case may make it impossible to avoid deciding that question in a future case. But even such an important canon of statutory construction as that favoring the avoidance of serious constitutional questions does not always carry the day. In this case, as described in detail by the Court, ante, at 423-434, several other important legal principles, including the presumption incralaw
The two principal textual statements under examination today are perfectly straightforward. "Upon certification by the Attorney General ... any civil action or proceeding ... . shall be deemed an action against the United States ... , and the United States shall be substituted as the party defendant." 28 U. S. C. § 2679(d)(1); see also § 2679(d)(4) ("Upon certification, any action or proceeding ... shall proceed in the same manner as any action against the United States filed pursuant to [the FTCA] ... "). Notwithstanding the Court's observation that some contexts can leave thecralaw
2 The Drivers Act provided for certification only in cases originating in state court, and judicial review was perforce limited to those cases. See 75 Stat. 539 (previously codified at 28 U. S. C. § 2679(d) (1982 ed.)).cralaw
Even if these textually grounded implications were not enough to confirm a plain reading of the text and decide the case, an anomalous jurisdictional consequence of the Court's position should be enough to warn us away from treating the Attorney General's certification as reviewable. The Court recognizes that there is nothing equivocal about the Act's provision that once a state tort action has been removed to a federal court after a certification by the Attorney General, it may never be remanded to the state system: "certification of the Attorney General shall conclusively establish scope ofcralaw
3 "The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority .... " u. S. Const., Art. III, § 2, cl. 1.cralaw
But the fallacy of this conclusion appears as soon as one recalls the fact that substitution of the United States as defendant (which establishes federal-question jurisdiction) is exclusively dependant on the scope-of-employment certification. The challenge to the certification is thus the equivalent of a challenge to the essential jurisdictional fact that the United States is a party, and the federal court's jurisdiction to review scope of employment (on the principal opinion's theory) is merely an example of any court's necessary authority to rule on a challenge to its own jurisdiction to try a particular action. To argue, as the principal opinion does, that authority to determine scope of employment justifies retention of jurisdiction whenever evidence bearing on jurisdiction and liability overlaps, is therefore tantamount to saying the authority to determine whether a court has jurisdiction over the cause of action supplies the very jurisdiction that is subject to challenge. It simply obliterates the distinction between the authority to determine jurisdiction and the jurisdiction that is the subject of the challenge, and the party whose jurisdictional claim was challenged will never lose: litigating the question whether an employee's allegedly tortious acts fall within the scope of employment will, of course, always require some evidence to show what the acts were. Accordingly, there will always be overlap between evidence going to the scope-of-employment determination and evidence bearing on the underlying liability claimed by the plaintiff, and for this reason federal-question jurisdiction in these cases becomes inevitable on the Court's view. The right to challenge it therefore becomes meaningless, as doescralaw
In sum, the congressional decision to make the Attorney General's certification conclusive was couched in plain terms, whose plain meaning is confirmed by contrasting the absence of any provision for review with just such a provision in the predecessor statute, and with an express provision for review of a refusal to certify, contained in the Westfall Act itself. The Court's contrary view implies a jurisdictional tenacity that Congress expressly declined to assert elsewhere in the Act, and invites a difficult and wholly unnecessary constitutional adjudication about the limits of Articlecralaw
Sometimes, however, there is an explanation for redundancy, rendering any asserted inference from it too shaky tocralaw
be trusted. Cf. United States Nat. Bank of Ore. v. Independent Ins. Agents of America, Inc., 508 U. S. 439, 459 (1993). That is the case with the provision that certification is conclusive on the issue of removal from state to federal court. The explanation takes us back to the Westfall Act's predecessor, the Federal Drivers Act, 75 Stat. 539, which was superseded upon passage of the current statute, Pub. L. 100-694, 102 Stat. 4563-4567. The Drivers Act made the FTCA the exclusive source of remedies for injuries resulting from the operation of any motor vehicle by a federal employee acting within the scope of his employment. 28 U. S. C. § 2679(b) (1982 ed.). Like the Westfall Act, the Drivers Act authorized the Attorney General to certify that a federal employee sued in state court was acting within the scope of employment during the incident allegedly giving rise to the claim, and it provided in that event for removal to the federal system, as well as for substitution of the United States as the defendant. § 2679(d). Unlike the Westfall Act, however, the Drivers Act explicitly directed district courts to review, "on a motion to remand held before a trial on the merits," whether any such case was "one in which a remedy by suit ... is not available against the United States." Ibid. The district courts and the courts of appeals routinely read this language to permit district courts to hear motions to remand challenging the Attorney General's scope-of-employment determination. See McGowan v. Williams, 623 F.2d 1239, 1242 (CA7 1980); Van Houten v. Ralls, 411 F.2d 940, 942 (CA9), cert. denied, 396 U. S. 962 (1969); Daugherty v. United States, 427 F. Supp. 222, 223-224 (WD Pa. 1977); accord, Seiden v. United States, 537 F.2d 867, 869 (CA6 1976); Levin v. Taylor, 464 F.2d 770, 771 (CADC 1972). Given the express permissibility of a motion to remand in order to raise a postremoval challenge to certification under the Drivers Act, when the old Act was superseded, and challenges to certification were eliminated, Congress could sensibly have seen some practical value in the redundancy of making it clear beyond question that thecralaw
4 The Court concludes that the provision for review of certification was omitted because it was joined with the provision for remand in the Drivers Act. Ante, at 433, n. 10. On a matter of this substance, the explanation does not give Congress credit for much intellectual discrimination. The same footnote also sells this dissent a bit short: we have no need to argue that omission of any provision to review scope of employment, in isolation, would conclusively have foreclosed review, and we have made the very point that a failure to provide for conclusiveness of removal would not have left that issue in doubt; on each point, the various items of interpretive evidence supplied by the text and by textual comparison with the Drivers Act are to be read together in pointing to whatever judgment they support.cralaw
The Court's final counterpoint to plain reading relies heavily on "the strong presumption that Congress intends judicial review of administrative action," citing a line of cases involving judicial challenges to regulations claimed to be outside the statutory authority of the administrative agencies that promulgated them. See ante, at 424-425, citing Bowen v. Michigan Academy of Family Physicians, 476 U. S. 667, 670673 (1986); Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner, 387 U. S. 136, 140 (1967). It is, however, a fair question whether this presumption, usually applied to permit review of agency regulations carrying the force and effect of law, should apply with equal force to a Westfall Act certification. The very narrow factual determination committed to the Attorney General's discretion is related only tangentially, if at all, to her primary executive duties; she determines only whether a federal employee, who will probably not even be affiliated with the Justice Department, acted within the scope of his employment on a particular occasion. This function is far removed from the agency action that gave rise to the presumption of reviewability in Bowen, supra, at 668-669, in which the Court considered whether Congress provided the Secretary of Health and Human Services with nonreviewable authority to promulgate certain Medicare distribution regulations, and in Abbott Laboratories, supra, at 138-139, in which the Court considered whether Congress provided the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare with nonreviewable authority to promulgate certain prescription drug labeling regulations.cralaw
5 The Court tries to convert this minimal influence into a "conflict of interest," ante, at 436, derived from an "impetus to certify [that is] overwhelming," ante, at 427, said to arise from a United States Attorney's fear that a Government employee would contest a refusal to certify and force the United States Attorney to litigate the issue. This suggestion will appear plausible or not depending on one's view of the frailty of United States Attorneys. We have to doubt that the Attorney General sees her United States Attorneys as quite so complaisant, and if Congress had thought that the Government's lawyers would certify irresponsibly just to avoid preparing for a hearing it would surely have retained the Drivers Act's provision for review of certification.cralaw