Opinion ID: 2141149
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: jurisdiction and sovereign immunity

Text: The first general statutory provision for claims against the State related to the operation of the Erie Canal (L 1817, ch 262). Through many statutory permutations, the modern Court of Claims was constituted in 1915 (L 1915, chs 1, 100). Its essential jurisdiction prescribed that  [i]n no case shall any liability be implied against the state , and no award shall be made on any claim against the state except upon such legal evidence as would establish liability against an individual or corporation in a court of law or equity (Code Civ Pro § 264 [emphasis added]). In Smith v State of New York (227 N.Y. 405), this Court held that the State had not waived its sovereign immunity except as expressly surrendered and, thus, preserved the unrelinquished sovereign immunity of the State ( id. , at 409-410). The operative construction canon is that [s]tatutes in derogation of the sovereignty of a state must be strictly construed and a waiver of immunity from liability must be clearly expressed .    In the absence of a legislative enactment specifically waiving this immunity, the state cannot be subjected to a liability therefor ( Smith v State , supra , at 410 [emphasis added]). The majority now ordains a new canon, using a judicial inference method not to fill a natural or legislative interstice, but to discover a vaguely unexplored universe of extensive tort exposure against the State, triable in a court of limited jurisdiction.
The history of the exclusive legislative authority with respect to the investiture of jurisdiction in the Court of Claims is plainly expressed in New York Constitution, article VI, § 9 (originally added in 1925 as art VI, § 23). It states that [t]he court shall have jurisdiction to hear and determine claims against the state or by the state against the claimant or between conflicting claimants as the legislature may provide  (NY Const, art VI, § 9 [emphasis added]; see , Court of Claims Act § 9). Court of Claims Act § 9 (2) precisely lists the subject-matter jurisdiction in words and structure that indicate a careful consideration by the Legislature of the categories and circumscriptions of claims to which the State's waiver of immunity would also apply. This Court, interpreting the State's statutory post- Smith waiver of immunity (L 1929, ch 467), noted that [i]t includes only claims which appear to the judicial mind and conscience to be such as the Legislature may declare    the State should satisfy ( Jackson v State of New York , 261 N.Y. 134, 138, rearg denied 261 N.Y. 637 [emphasis added]). The legislative history accompanying recodification of the Court of Claims Act shows no intention, understanding or contemplation to sweep the State's assumption of liability into uncharted and open waters as are at issue in this case ( see , Bill Jacket, L 1939, ch 860, Mem of James Barrett, Presiding Judge of the Ct Cl, at 2; Mem of Senator Feinberg, at 2-3). Section 9 of the Court of Claims Act provides, [t]he court shall have jurisdiction    2. To hear and determine a claim of any person, corporation or municipality against the state    for the torts of its officers or employees while acting as such officers or employees, providing the claimant complies with the limitations of this article ( id. [emphasis added]). Correspondingly, the State's waiver of sovereign immunity is contained in section 8 of the Act, which provides: The state hereby waives its immunity from liability and action and hereby assumes liability and consents to have the same determined in accordance with the same rules of law as applied to actions in the supreme court against individuals or corporations  (Court of Claims Act § 8 [emphasis added]). It is the interplay and application of the various constitutional and legislative declarations, with their evident and express limitations that ought to govern this controversy, not speculative attributions of implied and assumed legislative intent. The plaintiffs' predicate argument is that the Legislature, through its use of the word torts, implied an all-encompassing corral of wrongs. For starters and contrary to this theory, traditional tort law is not an undefinable, limitless arena of wrongs. Rather, the word of art reflects [t]he civil action for a tort    is commenced and maintained by the injured person, and its primary purpose is to compensate for the damage suffered, at the expense of the wrongdoer  (Prosser and Keeton, Torts § 2, at 7 [5th ed]). Professor Prosser also notes the realistic and sensible limitation that [i]t does not lie within the power of any judicial system to remedy all human wrongs (Prosser, op. cit. , § 4, at 23). Indeed, the word tort, for subject-matter jurisdictional purposes, should be viewed and determined discretely within that universe and context. A core feature of the defendant State's more nuanced argument, moreover, is not that the word tort is frozen like a fossil in time as of the original enactment of Court of Claims' jurisdiction. That is a strawman argument posed to overcome the cogent State position on virtually all points and authorities. Indeed, the focus in this statutory construction exercise should remain fixed on the proposition that the term tort, for these jurisdictional purposes, pertains only to those claims reasonably understood by the enactors, as part of the common-law tradition, developed within the tort root rubric and jurisprudence ( see, e.g. , Bovsun v Sanperi , 61 N.Y.2d 219; Battalla v State of New York , 24 N.Y.2d 980, affg 26 AD2d 203). The State's argument should prevail by a reasonable interpretation of the governing statute, the history of its enactment, and this Court's restrained interpretation of it and its own powers in this regard. A transformative redefinition and expansion into a fundamentally different juridical genre gives the holding of the instant case breadth-taking dimensions. Moreover, that approach ignores the well-established discipline that subject-matter jurisdiction, groundbreaking new remedies and their policy and practical ramifications, are matters appropriately within the legislative purview and, thus, not within some generalized supervisory or inferential adjudicative role of the courts ( see generally , Gershman, Supervisory Power of the New York Courts , 14 Pace L Rev 41 [1994]). This Court, following the general canon that any waiver of immunity by the State is to be narrowly construed, has further noted that the waiver of immunity (8) and grant of jurisdiction (9) are not absolute and open-ended ( Weiss v Fote , 7 N.Y.2d 579, 585-587). Relevant and analogous precedents illustratively point out that the State waived that immunity which it had enjoyed solely by reason of its sovereign character, but that the State retained its immunity for those governmental actions requiring expert judgment or the exercise of discretion ( Arteaga v State of New York , 72 N.Y.2d 212, 215-216; see , Tarter v State of New York , 68 N.Y.2d 511, 518-519). Significantly, in Sharapata v Town of Islip (56 N.Y.2d 332), this Court emphasized that it  is hard to believe that any attempt to include punitive damages [in Court of Claims Act § 8] would not have induced lively legislative debate , contemporary State history preceding the formulation of section 8 gives no indication that the matter ever evoked any legislative interest ( id. , at 337 [emphasis added]). The Court stated that: [T]he twin justifications for punitive damages  punishment and deterrence  are hardly advanced when applied to a governmental unit. As [then] Justice TITONE realistically put it in his opinion below, it would be anomalous to have `the persons who bear the burden of punishment, i.e., the taxpayers and citizens,' constitute `the self-same group who are expected to benefit from the public example which the granting of such damages supposedly makes of the wrongdoer' ( Sharapata v Town of Islip , supra , 56 NY2d, at 338-339, affg 82 AD2d 350). The holding of the instant case disregards the usefulness garnered from the parallel purposes and pertinent guidance reflected in the analysis of the punitive damages issue in respect to the constitutional tort species (majority opn, at 178, 192). In Steitz v City of Beacon (295 N.Y. 51), this Court, in interpreting the application of Court of Claims Act § 8 to municipalities, noted that [a]n intention to impose upon the city the crushing burden of such [liability] should not be imputed to the Legislature in the absence of language clearly designed to have that effect  ( id. , at 55 [emphasis added]). Yet, that is precisely what the stretched and attenuated analysis does in the instant case ( see , Weiss v Fote , 7 N.Y.2d 579, 586-587, supra ). It is, after all, the unique governmental police power that is involved here, not some ordinary form of individual or corporate tortious act. For that reason, among others, the claims asserted in this case are nowhere near sufficiently similar (majority opn, at 183) to traditionally recognized individual or corporate tort conduct, the limiting and qualifying phrase of the statute itself. The refined interpretation previously accorded to the State's waiver of immunity is also reflected in the handling of torts involving members of the State militia. In Goldstein v State of New York (281 N.Y. 396), the Court noted that if the word `officers' is given its broad meaning it would include every officer engaged in performing a duty placed upon him by law, including the Governor, judges, members of the Legislature and all others occupying an official position in the State. Such an interpretation of the statute would lead to an absurd conclusion  ( id. , at 405 [emphasis added]). The claim was dismissed because the State militia were not within the meaning of the State's waiver of sovereign immunity ( id. , at 406; see also , Newiadony v State of New York , 276 App Div 59). In 1953, the Legislature amended the Court of Claims Act (L 1953, ch 343) adding section 8-a by which the State waived its immunity for such torts. Notably, the Legislature  not the courts  expressly expanded this jurisdictional reach into that category, as it also did after Smith ( see , Jackson v State of New York , 261 N.Y. 134, 138, supra ). The Legislature does not leave these substantial definitional duties and demarcations to chance, implication, the fertile inferential method or to other entities, because definiteness and distribution of powers are important societal and jurisprudential values. It knows well how to be very plain about such matters in fulfilling its up-to-now distinctive responsibility. The Legislature has never contemplated the common-law word tort to include the kind of extensive constitutional domain advanced here because, not only did it not exist until recently, but also had the notion occurred or been presented to that legislative body, the policy debates would surely and necessarily have been lively indeed ( Sharapata v Town of Islip , 56 N.Y.2d 332, 337, supra ). When the Legislature enacted section 12 (1) of the Court of Claims Act  In no case shall any liability be implied against the state (emphasis added)  it could not have contemplated this kind of substantial judicial exertion, promulgating new substantive remedies.