Opinion ID: 784472
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The FTCA's Injury or Loss of Property Requirement

Text: 16 Enacted in 1946, the FTCA waives the federal government's sovereign immunity against certain tort claims arising out of the conduct of its employees. Section 1346(b)(1) provides: 17 [T]he district courts ... shall have exclusive jurisdiction of civil actions on claims against the United States, for money damages, accruing on and after January 1, 1945, for injury or loss of property, or personal injury or death caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government while acting within the scope of his office or employment, under circumstances where the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred. 18 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b)(1). See Federal Deposit Ins. Corp. v. Meyer, 510 U.S. 471, 477, 114 S.Ct. 996, 127 L.Ed.2d 308 (1994) (a claim must allege the six elements contained above to be actionable under § 1346(b)). Section 2674 provides in relevant part: 19 The United States shall be liable, respecting the provisions of this title relating to tort claims, in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances, but shall not be liable for interest prior to judgment or for punitive damages. 20 28 U.S.C. § 2674. Finally, Section 2680 lists various exceptions to the FTCA's waiver of immunity, such as an exception for claims arising out of certain intentional torts. 28 U.S.C. § 2680. 21 The district court held that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the Plaintiff's claim because the claim did not satisfy section 1346(b)(1)'s injury or loss of property requirement. Devlin, 285 F.Supp.2d 120. The court began by observing that the meaning of property is a matter of federal statutory construction. Id. at 123. It pointed out that the term was not defined by the FTCA and that it therefore had to be construed in accordance with its ordinary and natural meaning. Id at 123. The court then cited a Black's Law Dictionary definition of property: [t]hat which is peculiar or proper to any one person; that which belongs exclusively to one or ownership; the unrestricted and exclusive right to a thing; the right to dispose of a thing in every legal way, to possess it, to use it, and to exclude everyone else from interfering with it. Id. (citing BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 1216 (6th ed. 1990)). Noting that the Plaintiff does not contend that she has a legal claim as a beneficiary of the insurance policy, the court characterized what she claims to have lost as a result of the government's negligence as an expected property interest. Id. at 123-24. It then cited a Connecticut marital dissolution case for the proposition that `[a]n expectancy is only the bare hope of succession to the property of another, such as may be entertained by an heir apparent.... Such a hope is inchoate. It has no attribute of property, and the interest to which it relates is at the time nonexistent and may never exist.' Id. (quoting Krafick v. Krafick, 234 Conn. 783, 797, 663 A.2d 365 (1995)). The court concluded from this that Plaintiff's inchoate interest does not satisfy the definition of property under the FTCA, and cited a District of Maryland decision as support: [I]n order to be covered by the FTCA there must have been a physical impact of some type on the plaintiff or its property.... Id. (citing Charles Burton Builders, Inc. v. United States, 768 F.Supp. 160, 162 (D.Md. 1991)). The court also stated that the FTCA's waiver of sovereign immunity must be strictly construed in favor of the sovereign and that it is the plaintiff's burden to show that her claim falls within that waiver. Id. 22 The phrase injury or loss of property is not defined by the FTCA, see 28 U.S.C. § 2671 (defining other terms), and has not been interpreted by the Supreme Court 4 or by any previous decision of this court. The meaning of the phrase is obviously a matter of federal statutory interpretation, see Molzof v. United States, 502 U.S. 301, 305, 112 S.Ct. 711, 116 L.Ed.2d 731 (1992) (what the term punitive damages as used in section 2674 of the FTCA signifies is by definition a federal question). But recognizing this only sets up the first issue to be resolved — whether Congress intended the phrase to have a uniform federal meaning or, alternatively, meant the phrase to refer to the applicable state law for its content. See De Sylva v. Ballentine, 351 U.S. 570, 580, 76 S.Ct. 974, 100 L.Ed. 1415 (1956) (The scope of a federal right is, of course, a federal question, but that does not mean that its content is not to be determined by state, rather than federal law.) The district court's opinion did not squarely analyze this issue, nor do the briefs submitted by the parties. 23 This court's decision in Birnbaum v. United States, 588 F.2d 319 (2d Cir.1978), strongly suggests that the phrase incorporates state law. That case dealt with the phrase personal injury in the larger clause for injury or loss of property, or personal injury or death. 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b)(1). In Birnbaum, we upheld the government's liability for the tort of intrusion arising from the CIA's reading of certain mail sent to and from the Soviet Union. 5 The court began by stating that there was subject matter jurisdiction under the FTCA only (1) if there was a `personal injury' as defined by state law, and (2) if the acts causing the `personal injury' would give rise to liability under state law if executed by an employee of a private person. Id. at 322 (emphasis added). On the first issue, the court held: 24 Although upon the consolidated trial it appeared that no plaintiff was touched physically or harmed financially, and that the sole damage claim was mental suffering, New York recognizes as personal injury mental suffering that results from a known category of tort. 25 Id. (citing New York cases). 26 It would, of course, be anomalous if personal injury was defined by state law but the neighboring phrase injury or loss of property were not. And, although Birnbaum did not pause to consider them, there appear to be good reasons for taking this state-incorporation approach. An important factor in deciding whether to give a statutory provision a single federal meaning or one that varies by state is whether nationwide uniformity is important to the proper functioning of the statutory scheme in question. For example, in Reconstruction Finance Corp. v. Beaver County, 328 U.S. 204, 209, 66 S.Ct. 992, 90 L.Ed. 1172 (1946), the Supreme Court held that a federal statute that subjected the real property of certain agencies to State, Territorial, county, municipal, or local taxation to the same extent according to its value as other real property is taxed, left the definition of real property to local tax laws, so long as those laws did not discriminate against the federal government. In disagreeing with the government's position that a uniform federal definition should apply, the Court stated: 27 [T]he government relies on the generally accepted principle that Congress normally intends that its laws shall operate uniformly throughout the nation so that the federal program will remain unimpaired. But Congress in permitting local taxation of the real property, made it impossible to apply the law with uniform tax consequences in each state and locality. For the several states, and even the localities within them, have diverse methods of assessment, collection, and refunding. Tax rates vary widely. To all of these variable tax consequences Congress has expressly subjected the real property of the Defense Plant Corporation. In view of this express provision the normal assumption that Congress intends its law to have the same consequences throughout the nation cannot be made. 28 Id. at 209, 66 S.Ct. 992. 29 Similarly, the FTCA's basic thrust was decidedly not to create a federal common law of torts, but rather — as expressed in the final clause of section 1346(b)(1) and in section 2674 — to tie the government's liability — albeit subject to a host of qualifications — to the disparate and always evolving tort law of the several states. See Birnbaum, 588 F.2d at 327-28 ([B]y adopting the `law of the place' as the source for rules of decision under the Federal Tort Claims Act, Congress expressly negated any possible inference that federal courts were to exercise any `common lawmaking' power to fashion torts under the Act in the interest of national uniformity.). Cf. Richards v. United States, 369 U.S. 1, 11, 82 S.Ct. 585, 7 L.Ed.2d 492 (1962) (in holding that the choice-of-law rules of the state in which the negligence occurred are controlling, the Court stated: We should not assume that Congress intended to set the courts completely adrift from state law with regard to questions for which it has not provided a specific and definite answer in an act such as the one before us which, as we have indicated, is so intimately related to state law. ) (emphasis added). It would be antithetical to the FTCA's structure if each term in section 1346(b)(1), such as cause and negligent, were given a uniform federal meaning, thereby requiring plaintiffs to satisfy a layer of federal tort law requirements in addition to satisfying those of the law of the relevant state. 30 The Supreme Court has itself endorsed the state-law incorporation approach with regard to a closely related clause in Williams v. United States, 350 U.S. 857, 76 S.Ct. 100, 100 L.Ed. 761 (1955) (per curiam). 6 That case held that the phrase while acting within the scope of his office or employment in section 1346(b) is to be given meaning by the law of the relevant state. See also O'Toole v. United States, 284 F.2d 792, 795 (2d Cir.1960) ([ Williams ] disposed of the contention that the phrase `acting within the scope of his office or employment' was to be interpreted as a matter of federal law.). 31 Other Supreme Court cases, however, suggest that the phrase injury or loss of property might instead be assigned a uniform federal meaning. 7 In Laird v. Nelms, 406 U.S. 797, 92 S.Ct. 1899, 32 L.Ed.2d 499 (1972), for example, the Supreme Court interpreted the phrase negligent or wrongful act or omission to bar the plaintiff's claim, which sought recovery under a strict liability theory for damage resulting from the sonic booms produced by military planes. The Court stated: 32 The necessary consequence of the Court's holding in Dalehite is that the statutory language negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Government, is a uniform federal limitation on the types of acts committed by its employees for which the United States has consented to be sued. Regardless of state law characterization, the Federal Tort Claims Act itself precludes the imposition of liability if there has been no negligence or other form of misfeasance of nonfeasance, on the part of the Government. 33 Id. at 799, 92 S.Ct. 1899 (internal quotation marks omitted). 8 The phrase at issue in Laird appears immediately after the phrase that is of interest to us here, and this may suggest that the latter should also be assigned a uniform meaning. Laird, however, took the uniformity approach only so far. It by no means assigned an independent federal content to negligent whereby plaintiffs would first have to prove negligence under federal common law standards and then, having cleared that hurdle, prove negligence under the law of the place where the act or omission occurred. Rather, Laird established that Congress a) had in mind a (federal-law) taxonomy in which strict liability, negligence, and intentional torts were distinguished from each other; b) excluded the first category from the FTCA's scope; and c) left the content of the latter categories to the law of the relevant state. Laird, therefore, stakes out a hybrid approach on the continuum between a purely federal definition of a term and a purely state-law-derived one. 9 34 By contrast, Molzof v. United States took a purer federal-uniformity approach in its interpretation of the FTCA's bar on the recovery of punitive damages, see 28 U.S.C. § 2674. In Molzof, there was no suggestion that that term was meant to incorporate the understanding of punitive damages held by each state. Rather, the Court treated punitive damages as a term of art with a widely accepted common-law meaning. 502 U.S. 301, 306-08, 112 S.Ct. 711, 116 L.Ed.2d 731 (1992) (referring to judicial decisions and to legal dictionaries in existence during the drafting of the FTCA that defined punitive damages as damages awarded to punish defendants for torts committed with fraud, actual malice, violence, or oppression). But, of course, Molzof dealt with a separate section of the FTCA from the one before us, and it interpreted a clause expressly designed to exclude federal liability. As such, its application of a uniform federal definition is both understandable and not especially applicable to the instant case. 35 Although we are inclined to agree with the state-incorporation approach over the uniformity approach — and indeed may well be bound by Birnbaum v. United States to adopt the former — we need not conclusively determine the issue, because we conclude that, under either approach, Plaintiff's claim is one for injury or loss of property. We will apply each approach in turn. In order to do so, however, we must first decide how to characterize the loss that the Plaintiff claims to have suffered. 36 The government argues that the fact that Plaintiff would have become a beneficiary of her brother's life insurance policy had the Designation of Beneficiary been filed properly is beside the point.... [S]he was not properly designated and she did not become a beneficiary. Even though she may have expected to become a beneficiary upon her brother's death, her disappointment was not an `injury or loss of property, or personal injury or death.' We disagree. The proper characterization of Plaintiff's loss is of her status as beneficiary, that is, of what she would have been in the period before Murratti's death had she been designated in a proper fashion. Had that happened, Murratti would still have retained the right to change beneficiaries at any time by filing another Designation of Beneficiary form. It is this status, as a beneficiary that could be removed, that Plaintiff would have had but for the government's alleged negligence. The question then becomes whether the loss of such a status or interest qualifies as an injury or loss of property under the FTCA.
37 When giving a term a uniform definition for purposes of a statute like the FTCA, the term can either be given its ordinary or natural meaning or be treated as a term of art that has a conventional meaning. 10 Compare Meyer, 510 U.S. at 476, 114 S.Ct. 996 (construing the FTCA's use of term cognizable in accordance with its ordinary or natural meaning and citing a Black's Law Dictionary definition); Smith v. United States, 507 U.S. 197, 201-02, 113 S.Ct. 1178, 122 L.Ed.2d 548 (1993) (construing the FTCA's exception for claims arising in a foreign country in terms of its commonsense meaning, and thus as referring to a region or tract of land and not a sovereign state); and Kosak v. United States, 465 U.S. 848, 852, 104 S.Ct. 1519, 79 L.Ed.2d 860 (1984) (stating, in reference to the FTCA's exception for claims arising from customs officials' detention of goods, that [t]he starting point of our analysis of these competing interpretations must, of course, be the language of § 2680(c). We assume that the legislative purpose is expressed by the ordinary meaning of the words used.) (quotation marks and citation omitted); with Molzof, 502 U.S. at 306-07, 112 S.Ct. 711 (stating, in reference to the FTCA's bar on the recovery of punitive damages, that `[p]unitive damages' is a legal term of art that has a widely accepted common-law meaning, and noting the cardinal rule of statutory construction that holds that [w]here Congress borrows terms of art in which are accumulated the legal tradition and meaning of centuries and practice, it presumably knows and adopts the cluster of ideas that were attached to each borrowed word in the body of learning from which it was taken.... In such case, absence of contrary direction may be taken as satisfaction with widely accepted definitions, not as a departure from them.) (internal quotation marks omitted); id. at 307-308, 112 S.Ct. 711 (This rule carries particular force in interpreting the FTCA. Certainly there is no warrant for assuming that Congress was unaware of established tort definitions when it enacted the Tort Claims Act in 1946, after spending some twenty-eight years of congressional drafting and redrafting, amendment and counter-amendment.) (internal quotation marks omitted). 38 The district court seemingly took neither approach. After defining property in a dictionary fashion as, inter alia, the right to dispose of a thing in every legal way, to possess it, to use it, and to exclude everyone else from interfering with it, it relied on a District of Maryland decision that [i]n order to be covered by the FTCA there must have been a physical impact of some type on the plaintiff or its property, Charles Burton Builders, Inc., 768 F.Supp. at 162 (emphasis added). In doing this, the district court was positing a definition of property that emphasized tangibility or thing-ness. 11 But this definition is not only contrary to property's ordinary dictionary meaning, 12 it is also clearly untenable in the context of the FTCA. Section 1346(b)(1) manifestly encompasses some torts that are not accompanied by a physical impact. There is no doubt, for example, that legal malpractice is cognized by the FTCA because Congress has prescribed special rules for FTCA claims relating to the malpractice of Department of Defense and Coast Guard lawyers, including an exemption of such claims from the FTCA's misrepresentation exception and a provision making the FTCA the exclusive remedy for such negligence. See 10 U.S.C. § 1054(a)&(e). 39 That section 1346(b)(1) encompasses a wide sweep of intangible tort claims is also evidenced by Congress' decision to limit that liability by setting out specific exceptions in section 2680. These exceptions exclude some but not all non-physical harms. See 28 U.S.C. § 2680(h) (barring claims arising out of, inter alia, libel, slander, misrepresentation, deceit, and interference with contract rights). If the kind of non-physical harm at stake in interference-with-contract-rights actions did not qualify as injury or loss of property in section 1346(b)(1), there would have been little reason to exclude such actions in section 2680. 13 See Kosak, 465 U.S. at 852 n. 7, 104 S.Ct. 1519 (a construction of one provision of the FTCA that renders another provision mere surplusage is subject to considerable doubt). 40 Congress was indeed interested in limiting the scope of the government's waiver of immunity from suits for negligence and intentional torts, but we have found no indication either in the language or legislative history of the Act that Congress meant to accomplish this through the phrase injury or loss of property, and every indication that Congress did so through the specific and detailed exceptions it established in section 1280. 14 It is little surprise, then, that both the Supreme Court and the federal appeal courts have regularly looked to those exceptions to effectuate Congress' desire to limit governmental tort liability, rather than doing so by reading limitations into the concept of property. See, e.g., United States v. Gaubert, 499 U.S. 315, 111 S.Ct. 1267, 113 L.Ed.2d 335 (1991) (claim barred by discretionary-function exception where a shareholder sued to recover, inter alia, the loss in value of his shares allegedly caused by the government's negligent supervision of directors of a savings and loan association); United States v. Neustadt, 366 U.S. 696, 81 S.Ct. 1294, 6 L.Ed.2d 614 (1961) (claim barred by misrepresentation exception where a purchaser relied on a faulty Federal Housing Administration appraisal and consequently paid too much for a house); see also Jones v. United States, 207 F.2d 563 (2d Cir.1953) (claim barred by misrepresentation exception where plaintiffs sold stock for too low a price in reliance upon the U.S. Geographical Survey's inaccurate estimates concerning the oil productivity of certain land); Art Metal-U.S.A., Inc. v. United States, 753 F.2d 1151 (D.C.Cir.1985) (claim barred by interference-with-contract-rights exception, where a contractor charged General Services Administration with tortious interference with prospective economic advantage for having constructively excluded plaintiff in violation of federal procurement regulations). Significantly, in none of these cases did the courts suggest that the plaintiff's claim was not for injury or loss of property. 41 But finding that injury or loss of property encompasses harm that is not physical does not suffice to support Plaintiff's claim. We must also determine whether her interest in being a beneficiary is sufficiently substantial to qualify as property for purposes of this torts action. Admittedly, the technical meaning of property is more difficult to pin down than that of punitive damages, which was at issue in Molzof. This is so because property is a term with a famously diffuse set of meanings across a range of areas of law. And, at least since the end of the nineteenth century, the conceptualistic approach to understanding its meaning has given way to a functionalist approach that designates something as property according to the context and purpose of the designation. 15 Consequently, examining the use of the word property in the law of, say, taxation may be of little help if we are interested in the meaning of that term in a statute dealing with torts. Cf. Segal v. Rochelle, 382 U.S. 375, 380, 86 S.Ct. 511, 15 L.Ed.2d 428 (1966) (observing, in interpreting the Bankruptcy Act, that [i]t is impossible to give any categorical definition to the word `property,' nor can we attach to it in certain relations the limitations which would be attached to it in others. Whether an item is classed as `property' by the Fifth Amendment's Just-Compensation Clause or for purposes of a state taxing statute cannot decide hard cases under the Bankruptcy Act, whose own purposes must ultimately govern.) (internal quotation marks omitted). 42 In tort law, injury to property and loss of property have neither conventional nor ordinary, dictionary-type meanings. They are, instead, defined in terms of the kinds of harms to property for which a plaintiff may seek redress. As a result, in order to determine whether there exists an injury or loss of property, we must examine whether Plaintiff's claim seeks to vindicate an interest that is given protection by the general common law of torts. In other words, we must determine whether Plaintiff's interest is treated as property for torts purposes. For the reasons given below, we conclude that Plaintiff's claim satisfies this requirement. 43 The parties focus their energies on whether the interest of a beneficiary of a life insurance policy — or the analogous interest of a potential heir to a will — is a mere expectancy or something more substantial. And, predictably, they take different sides on the matter. In fact, according to a leading insurance treatise, states take one of two views. A majority of jurisdictions hold that, where a right to change the beneficiary is reserved in a life insurance policy, the beneficiary has only a revocable expectancy contingent upon being the beneficiary at the time of the insured's death. 4 COUCH ON INSURANCE § 58:14 (3d ed. 2003) (collecting cases); see also RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF PROPERTY (Wills & Don. Trans.) § 2.1 (comment d) (1999) (Before the decedent's death, a potential heir has no property interest but merely an `expectancy' (an inchoate interest) in the decedent's intestate estate.). A minority of jurisdictions, by contrast, holds that a beneficiary of a life insurance contract acquires not merely an expectancy in the anticipated benefits, but a qualified vested interest subject to be divested if a change in the beneficiary is made. COUCH § 58:15 (also using the terminology qualified property right). 44 Couch's treatise, however, notes that there is little, if any, practical difference between the mere expectancy and qualified property right positions: 45 [T]o the extent that the concept of a qualified property right, or of a vested right subject to divestment, has been adopted to give the beneficiary standing to object to a change of beneficiary, the same result could be reached by simply interpreting expectancy in the property law sense, which enables an heir to challenge the validity of a disinheriting or excluding will even when the heir's right to the property in question is merely an expectancy. 46 Although the power to change beneficiaries is reserved, the beneficiary's interest is sufficiently substantial that it may be recognized in law or equity. Id. 16 47 In other words, the label given to a beneficiary's interest seems not to be determinative of what recourse the law gives to a beneficiary to protect her status against the actions of third parties. Indeed, the treatise goes on to note that, under the majority rule, where a change of beneficiary has been accomplished by fraud or undue influence practiced by the substituted beneficiary, the rights of the original beneficiary are not cut off by the attempted substitution. Equity may entertain jurisdiction ... to set aside a change to a substituted beneficiary.... The original beneficiary may also sue the second beneficiary for damages.... Id. § 60:72. Cf. id. (a minority view holds that where the insured had the right to change beneficiaries, the original beneficiary has no vested right which gives him or her any standing to protest that the insured was fraudulently induced to exercise his or her right). 48 Were this all we had to go on, we would be hard put to say which view should be deemed that taken by the FTCA. If, however, we look to the most relevant area of law, torts, the matter becomes much easier. For, in tort law, we find that the interest of a beneficiary or heir is regularly afforded substantial protection. 17 For example, the RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS delineates a cause of action for the intentional interference with inheritance or gift as follows: 49 One who by fraud, duress, or other tortious means intentionally prevents another from receiving from a third person an inheritance or gift that he would otherwise have received is subject to liability to the other for loss of the inheritance or gift. 50 RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS § 774B (1979); see also id. (comment b) (gift includes the designation of another as a beneficiary under an insurance policy). Significantly, for the issue before us, whether the beneficiary's interest is treated as a mere expectancy or as something more is not a threshold consideration going to whether a tort action lies. Rather, the contingent nature of the interest goes instead to the existence of factual causation. Accordingly, the beneficiary must provide proof amounting to a reasonable degree of certainty that the bequest or devise would have been in effect at the time of the death of the testator or that the gift would have been made inter vivos if there had been no such interference. Id. (comment d). 51 Most states that have decided the issue in the inheritance context are in accord with the Restatement's approach. See Diane J. Klein, The Disappointed Heir's Revenge, Southern Style: Tortious Interference with Expectation of Inheritance — A Survey with Analysis of State Approaches in the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, 55 BAYLOR L. REV. 79, 84 n. 15 (2003) (reporting that approximately 24 states have recognized tortious interference with expectation of inheritance, less than 10 states have rejected it, and the rest have not decided); see also Sonja A. Soehnel, Annotation, Liability in Damages for Interference with Expected Inheritance or Gift, 22 A.L.R.4th 1229, at § 2, 1983 WL 191057 (1983) (In those cases in which the courts have expressed a general view as to the propriety of a cause of action for damages for interference with a gift, which include a number of cases involving interference with an inheritance, the courts have generally stated that such a cause of action would lie.) 18 52 The early, and hence leading, case of Mitchell v. Langley, 143 Ga. 827, 85 S.E. 1050 (1915), in which the plaintiff sued her sister for writing letters to their ill half-brother that wrongfully induced him to cancel a benefit society certificate that had named all three sisters as equal beneficiaries, and for leading him to obtain a new certificate making the defendant the sole beneficiary, stated it thus: 53 The fact that this status has not ripened into a vested and irrevocable ownership of the beneficial interest, and that the member has a right to change it, does not authorize a third party to maliciously and fraudulently destroy the status and thus prevent the interest or expectancy of the beneficiary from ripening so that he will receive the fund. The reserved right of the member is one thing; the malicious and fraudulent interposition of a third party to destroy the status is another. 54 85 S.E. at 1052. 55 Further support for our conclusion that one's interest as a beneficiary or heir is sufficient to support liability in tort can be found in the cases dealing with a lawyer's liability to an intended heir for the negligent preparation of a will or other estate-planning device. The privity requirement that once blocked third-parties from bringing professional negligence claims has eroded steadily since Glanzer v. Shepard, 233 N.Y. 236, 135 N.E. 275 (1922) (Cardozo, J. ), so that, today, an overwhelming majority of jurisdictions recognizes an intended beneficiary's cause of action for the negligent drawing of a will. See Barcelo v. Elliott, 923 S.W.2d 575, 579 (Tex.1996) (Cornyn, J., dissenting) (collecting cases and reporting that only four states in addition to Texas do not allow the intended beneficiary to sue). In these cases, the contingent nature of the plaintiff's loss — i.e. the fact that, had the plaintiff been properly named in the will, the testator, before her death, could have revoked the plaintiff's status as an heir and designated another — is given no special attention. 56 In view of the widespread recognition of liability for tortious interference with an inheritance and of a lawyer's liability to an intended heir — not only now, but at the time Congress used the phrase injury or loss of property in the FTCA — we conclude that the loss that Plaintiff complains of would fall within the meaning of that phrase. 19 It would, that is, if the phrase is to be given a uniform, federal definition. What, however, if the phrase depends for its meaning on the law of the relevant state?
57 We believe that the same result is reached if injury or loss of property is defined federally (i.e. for purposes of the FTCA), in reference to the law of Connecticut, the relevant state in this case, rather than in reference to the general common law. 58 When a federal statute looks to state law to give meaning to one of its provisions, it does not do so indiscriminately. Thus, in our case, given the many uses of the term property across the range of statutory and common-law fields, it would not do to throw a dart at the Connecticut case reports and use whatever definition of property is thereby encountered. Rather, we must do what the Supreme Court did in De Sylva v. Ballentine, 351 U.S. 570, 76 S.Ct. 974, 100 L.Ed. 1415 (1956), and focus on that aspect of state law that is most relevant to the purposes of the federal statute at issue. In De Sylva, after deciding to refer to California law to determine whether illegitimate children are children under the Copyright Act and therefore empowered to renew their deceased parents' copyrights, the Court examined California's inheritance statute, since [t]his is really a question of the descent of property. Id. at 582, 76 S.Ct. 974. The Court found it sufficient that the child was eligible for inheritance under this statute, regardless of the fact that the child was not legitimate for other purposes under California law. Id. By doing this, the High Court made clear that to decide the state meaning of a federally used phrase, federal courts should be guided by those state cases that deal with the circumstances akin to those at play in the federal statute. 59 The parties' submissions, in the instant case, do not comport with the above principle. Thus, the government offers ample Connecticut case law to support the proposition that, under CONN. GEN. STAT. § 46b-81, which deals with equitable distribution upon the dissolution of a marriage, a person's interest as a potential heir is not subject to distribution because it is a mere expectancy. See, e.g., Krause v. Krause, 174 Conn. 361, 387 A.2d 548 (Conn. 1978) (interpreting a predecessor of § 46b-81 and stating: Expectancy is the bare hope of succession to the property of another, such as may be entertained by an heir apparent. Such a hope is inchoate. It has no attribute of property, and the interest to which it relates is at the time nonexistent and may never exist.) (internal quotation marks omitted); Rubin v. Rubin, 204 Conn. 224, 527 A.2d 1184 (Conn. 1987) (holding that an expected inheritance is not subject to distribution under § 46b-81). 60 For her part, Plaintiff conversely (and correctly) points out that, in the life insurance context, Connecticut adheres to the view that the interest of the beneficiary of a life insurance policy is more than a mere expectancy. See COUCH § 58:15 (placing Connecticut in the qualified property right or vested right subject to divestment category); see also Allen v. Home Nat'l Bank, 120 Conn. 306, 180 A. 498, 500-01 (Conn. 1935) (holding that a widow's interest before her insured husband's death was more than a mere expectancy under Connecticut law: Where, as here, the right to change [beneficiaries] is reserved to the assured, the interest of the beneficiary is yet deemed to be vested, although qualified in that it is subject to be defeated by an exercise of the right reserved.... So long as the power of defeasance is not exercised, [beneficiaries] stand in the position of one having a title which the law will recognize, and for the protection of which they are entitled to the usual legal and equitable remedies.) (internal quotation marks omitted; second alteration in original); Klebanoff v. Mutual Life Ins. Co. of New York, 362 F.2d 975, 978 (2d Cir.1966) (noting that, under Connecticut law, a beneficiary stands in the position of one having a title which the law will recognize so long as the power of defeasance is not exercised). 61 The parties thus confront us with cases standing for seemingly conflicting propositions. In some contexts, an interest analogous to the one before us is termed a mere expectancy, while, in others, the interest is described as more than a mere expectancy and is the sort that commentators call a qualified property right, see COUCH § 58:15. This situation, however, only underscores the fact that the appropriate place to find the meaning of injury or loss of property lies in Connecticut tort law and not either in the law of marital dissolution or in that of insurance. 20 That is, the approach we took in the last section, when we were seeking a uniform federal meaning for the phrase, is also the one we must follow with regard to the law of the relevant state. 62 The question thus becomes whether a person's interest as a named beneficiary or potential heir is a property interest that is protected by the tort law of Connecticut. 21 We conclude that it is because Connecticut follows the majority of jurisdictions both in recognizing the tort of interference with an inheritance, see Benedict v. Smith, 34 Conn.Supp. 63, 376 A.2d 774 (Conn.Super.Ct.1977), 22 and in recognizing an intended heir's cause of action against a lawyer for the negligent drawing of a will, see Stowe v. Smith, 184 Conn. 194, 441 A.2d 81, 84 (Conn. 1981); Krawczyk v. Stingle, 208 Conn. 239, 543 A.2d 733, 735 (Conn. 1988). 23 63 It follows that, under either the uniform federal approach or the state-incorporation one, Plaintiff's claim satisfies the requirement of injury or loss of property.