Opinion ID: 421796
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Purpose of a Governmental Immunity for Discretionary Acts

Text: 64 Long before its embodiment in the FTCA, the concept of discretion acquired a well established common law meaning in suits against government officers. Although the sovereign was totally immune from tort liability, suits for non-monetary relief were regularly permitted through mandamus or injunction actions against agents of the sovereign. To avoid the bar of sovereign immunity, courts indulged the fiction that a remedy could be had against a government officer, even though, in reality, relief would come from the government [229 U.S.App.D.C. 196] itself. 59 In such cases, the familiar ministerial/discretionary distinction was used to separate permissible actions nominally against the officer from impermissible actions deemed to be against the government. One of the earliest and most well known statements of this principle appears in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 2 L.Ed. 60 (1803), where Chief Justice Marshall ruled that mandamus would lie where an officer is directed by law to do a certain act ... affecting the absolute rights of individuals, but not where the issuance of mandamus would require decision of [q]uestions in their nature political or inquiry into how the executive, or executive officers, perform duties in which they have a discretion. Id. at 170. As we explain below, the same concern for limiting judicial intrusion into executive and legislative domains underlies the discretionary immunity embodied in the FTCA. 65 The government's immunity from tort liability traditionally rested on broader justifications. In the early part of this century, however, the doctrine was given increasingly narrow application as the reasons for its existence were gradually discarded. Sovereign immunity's two traditional stanchions--the king can do no wrong, 60 and there can be no legal right as against the authority that makes the law on which the right depends 61 --were thoroughly discredited in a series of leading articles by Professor Edwin Borchard. 62 Enacted in the reformist climate initiated by these articles, see Keifer & Keifer v. RFC, 306 U.S. 381, 391, 59 S.Ct. 516, 519, 83 L.Ed. 784 (1939) (the present climate of opinion ... has brought governmental immunity from suit into disfavor), the FTCA was one of the earliest efforts in a widely accepted move by courts and legislatures, both state and federal, to mitigate unjust consequences of sovereign immunity from suit. Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 135, 139, 71 S.Ct. 153, 156, 95 L.Ed. 152 (1950). 63 66 But as judicial abrogation and general legislative waiver of the doctrine gained ascendency, only the most zealous detractors of sovereign immunity called for its total abolition. There was a general recognition that the doctrine still had a place in modern jurisprudence despite its association with out-moded absolutist notions of government. 64 [T]he source of [sovereign [229 U.S.App.D.C. 197] immunity's] ... continuing vitality where the royal privilege no longer exists, Justice Stone declared in 1938, is to be found in the public policy now underlying the rule even though it may in the beginning have had a different policy basis. Guaranty Trust Co. v. United States, 304 U.S. 126, 132, 58 S.Ct. 785, 788, 82 L.Ed. 1224 (1938). 67 The modern policy basis justifying sovereign immunity from suit has three principal themes. First, and most important, under traditional principles of separation of powers, courts should refrain from reviewing or judging the propriety of the policymaking acts of coordinate branches. 65 Second, consistent with the related doctrine of official immunity, courts should not subject the sovereign to liability where doing so would inhibit vigorous decisionmaking by government policymakers. 66 Third, in the interest of preserving public revenues and property, courts should be wary of creating huge and unpredictable governmental liabilities by exposing the sovereign to damage claims for broad policy decisions that necessarily impact large numbers of people. 67 Framed in different fashions, each of these themes appears again and again, alone or in combination, as a modern justification for retaining a form of immunity, under the general rationale that courts should not interfere with government operations and policymaking. 68