Opinion ID: 6318057
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Legislative Action

Text: The second “special factor” precluding an extension of Bivens here is “legislative action suggesting that Congress does not want a [Bivens] damages remedy.” Abbasi, 137 S. Ct. at 1865. In the PLRA of 1996, Congress sought to address a backlog in prisoner-initiated litigation by imposing new exhaustion requirements meant to reduce the quantity of federal lawsuits. See 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a), (c). Tellingly, the PLRA did not include any damages remedies against federal prison officials although its drafters were well aware of the limited scope of the Bivens remedy extended in Carlson for the inadequate provision of medical care. In Abbasi, the Supreme Court explicitly noted that “Congress had specific occasion to consider the matter of prisoner abuse and to consider the proper way to remedy those wrongs” when enacting the PLRA, but “chose not to extend the Carlson damages remedy to cases involving other types of prisoner mistreatment.” 137 S. Ct. at 1865. This reasoning precludes an implied remedy for Hoffman’s Eighth Amendment intentional harm claim based on allegations of prisoner-on-prisoner violence instigated by a guard. My colleagues cannot escape the fact that Congress implicitly accepted the limited scope of the remedy in Carlson (1980) by failing to expand upon it when enacting the PLRA (1996). The majority’s allusion to the PLRA’s complaint. (citing Osborn v. Haley, 549 U.S. 225, 247 (2007)). But we should not be so quick to cast aside a role for state tort law when such suits are consistent with the Westfall Act. The Attorney General may withdraw a certification if new evidence comes to light, and contrary to the majority opinion’s statements suggesting otherwise, the court may override such a certification if the plaintiff sets out allegations capable, if true, of proving the employee acted outside the scope of his employment. See Saleh, 848 F.3d at 889. HOFFMAN V. PRESTON 47 “general purpose” as merely a procedural statute is unavailing. As the majority itself recognizes, Congress unquestionably had damages remedies on their mind in writing the PLRA, as evinced by 42 U.S.C. 1997e(e), a provision which expressly limits the scope of claims on which a prisoner can recover damages on due to “mental or emotional injury.” And to be sure, the PLRA is not merely an “isolated amendment” to an otherwise innocuous law, AMG Capital Mgmt., LLC v. FTC, 141 S. Ct. 1341, 1351 (2021), but instead is precisely the type of comprehensive statutory scheme courts should look to “for guidance on the appropriate boundaries of judge-made causes of actions.” Hernandez, 140 S. Ct. at 747. If the PLRA can be said to have any “purpose,” that purpose is clearly to limit the scope of remedies of which a prisoner may avail himself, whether evidenced through the enhanced procedural requirements a prisoner must meet before bringing a claim, or in the limited scope of recovery a prisoner can receive once a claim is properly brought. And perhaps most fundamentally of all, even if it wanted to do so, how could Congress disallow a Bivens remedy, as the majority opinion seems to demand in order to give any weight to the PLRA in the context of the special factors analysis? The majority discounts the relevancy of the PLRA in the special factors analysis by observing that while the “law did not explicitly create a stand-alone monetary damages remedy against federal correctional officers, [] it did not explicitly disallow one either.” However, as was said long ago: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803). And here, the Bivens Court didn’t simply say what a run-of-the-mill statute meant—it said what the Constitution itself meant. Congress cannot restrict the Bivens remedy any more than it could 48 HOFFMAN V. PRESTON restrict the Fourth Amendment, upon which Bivens is based, or any other constitutional provision. See, e.g., Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428, 436–37 (2000) (overruling a 1968 statute designed to abrogate Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), because “Congress may not legislatively supersede our decisions interpreting and applying the Constitution.”). Therefore, the majority errs in holding that “[n]o significant meaning can be attributed to the fact that Congress said nothing about the availability or unavailability of damages under Bivens.” For all these reasons, legislative action in enacting the PLRA undoubtedly counsels hesitation against expanding Bivens to this new context.