Opinion ID: 687261
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Current Quandary

Text: 60 Unfortunately, the emphasis on discipline led the circuit courts--and perhaps the Supreme Court itself--onto a path that they were ultimately unwilling to follow. Because key questions of military discipline often seem to involve the government's control of the tortfeasor rather than the victim, the Feres analysis over time, came to focus as much on the relationship between the military and the injurer as it did on the relationship between the military and the injured plaintiff. This view of discipline is evident, if not necessarily determinative, in case after case in which courts found a Feres bar. 7 61 But any discipline rationale that focuses on the relationship of the tortfeasor to the government has a fundamental flaw--namely, that the same acts, by the same injurer, in the same disciplinary relationship to the government, lead without question, to government FTCA liability when the victim is a civilian. See Johnson, 481 U.S. at 700, 107 S.Ct. at 2074 (Scalia, J., dissenting); Stencel Aero Engineering Corp. v. United States, 431 U.S. 666, 676-77, 97 S.Ct. 2054, 2060, 52 L.Ed.2d 665 (1977) (Marshall, J., dissenting). Feres bars the suit only if the injured party is a member of the military. This inherent conflict was bound to surface sooner or later. Ironically, it did not emerge in a case where the claimant was a civilian and severe military discipline issues between the government and the military injurer were, nonetheless, at stake. Rather, it appeared in a case involving a member of the armed services whose estate sued the government for FTCA respondeat superior liability on account of the alleged negligence of civilians. See United States v. Johnson, 481 U.S. 681, 107 S.Ct. 2063, 95 L.Ed.2d 648 (1987). 62 In Johnson, the victim was a Coast Guard helicopter pilot on a rescue mission and was killed due to a radar mishap for which the Federal Aviation Administration was responsible. Id. at 683, 107 S.Ct. at 2064-65. The decedent was on active duty, and so the government argued Feres. The Eleventh Circuit concluded, however, that since the injurer was not in the military, no issues of discipline (by now seemingly the dominant rationale for the Feres ) were at play. Id. at 684-85, 107 S.Ct. at 2065-66. 63 On appeal, the Supreme Court could have found that the facts raised significant discipline questions involving the decedent-servicemember and the government. It could then have held that these by then perfectly acceptable Feres grounds barred the suit. Or it could have followed Justice Scalia, who in an extraordinarily powerful dissent, argued against extending Feres to cases in which the injurer was not in the military. Id. at 692-703, 107 S.Ct. at 2069-75 (Scalia, J. dissenting). 8 Either way, discipline would have remained the dominant Feres rationale. Instead, the Court did neither. 64 The Feres doctrine, the court said in Johnson, did not depend on discipline alone. It rested, rather, on three grounds--the desirability of a uniform federal rule, the existence of the federal compensation scheme, and concerns for military discipline. Id. at 689-91, 107 S.Ct. at 2068-69. Cf. Stencel Aero Engineering Corp. v. United States, 431 U.S. at 672-74, 97 S.Ct. at 2058-59 (considering these three factors in holding that Feres barred third party indemnity claim against government by manufacturer of a defective product that injured a serviceman while on duty). Thus, the Court resurrected its original justifications (except, of course, the totally abandoned individual liability analogue) and made clear that those rationales were no longer, no longer controlling. Shearer, 473 U.S. at 58, n. 4, 105 S.Ct. at 3043, n. 4. These two original grounds, together with disciplinary considerations, both explained Feres, see Johnson 481 U.S. at 688-91, 107 S.Ct. at 2067-69, and justified barring the plaintiff's FTCA suit in Johnson itself. Id. at 691-92, 107 S.Ct. at 2069-70. No one factor governed, and all were to be evaluated. 65 Because the lower courts have found the rationales other than discipline extremely difficult to apply in a coherent manner, see e.g. Elliott v. United States, 13 F.3d 1555, 1559 (11th Cir.) (first two rationales provide no help in determining when an injury occurs 'incident to service' ), vacated for reh'g in banc, 28 F.3d 1076 (11th Cir.) (in banc), affirming district court judgment by equally divided court, 37 F.3d 617 (11th Cir.1994), it is not surprising that Johnson--a decision that we are bound to follow--left both the doctrine and the lower courts more at loose ends than ever. The Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, for example, have attempted to circumvent this problem by conducting a nominal three factor Feres analysis only after resolving the threshold--and in practice determinative--issue of whether the plaintiff's injury was sustained incident to service. See e.g. Parker v. United States, 611 F.2d 1007, 1013-15 (5th Cir.1980) (adopting a three-part test for deciding whether servicemember's activity is incident to service); Pierce v. United States, 813 F.2d 349, 352-54 (11th Cir.1987) (applying Parker test). This Circuit, on the other hand, has instructed the district courts to analyze servicemember claims in light of the 'three broad rationales' underlying Feres, and to determine whether [the plaintiff's] injuries 'arise out of or in the course of activity incident to service.'  Sanchez v. United States, 839 F.2d 40, 42 (2d Cir.1988) (per curiam), but has given no guidance as to how this is to be done in a coherent fashion. Neither approach is fully satisfactory. 66 It seems to us that there are two ways in which the Feres doctrine can be dealt with today. They would both lead to the same result in this case. The first approach would be to agree with Justice Scalia's dissent in Johnson and to admit that Feres is a mistake--was perhaps always a mistake--and should be scrapped. That option is, of course, not open to us. 9 After all, this case does not present one of those exceedingly rare situations in which a lower court can so clearly foresee that the Supreme Court will reverse itself that it can ignore a Supreme Court precedent. See Barnette v. W.Va. State Bd. of Educ., 47 F.Supp. 251, 252-53 (S.D.W.Va.1942) (Parker, J.) (disregarding prior Supreme Court flag salute precedent where a majority of the Court had expressed its desire to overrule its prior decision and the threatened violation of religious liberty was clear), aff'd, 319 U.S. 624, 63 S.Ct. 1178, 87 L.Ed. 1628 (1943). Feres has been regularly--albeit inconsistently--applied by the Supreme Court, and the mere existence of a convincing dissent in a closely divided Court cannot alter its binding force. 67 The second possibility is to go back to the Feres and Brooks cases and see whether, taken together, these decisions provide a consistent thread of meaning that we can use to sew up the holes that exist in the doctrine today. If such a meaning exists, and if that meaning is consistent with the three factors enumerated in Johnson, then these factors can function as guideposts for the lower courts--rather than serve merely as ritual words to be announced, formulaically and ex cathedra, after a court has decided to apply or to eschew Feres on some other ground. We think such a reading is possible and that it results in a workable doctrine. 10