Opinion ID: 687261
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Role of Discipline

Text: 75 Even if Feres were not justified by a desire to emulate workers' compensation laws in the military context, we believe that the doctrine could still find a basis in the prudential grounds raised by Professors Bickel and Wellington. In other words, some FTCA suits by military personnel would still be barred because their prosecution would lead to significant judicial interference in military decisions. But what is significant interference? In answering this question we must revisit the distinction between discipline issues affecting the injurer and discipline issues affecting the injured military-plaintiff. 76 Considerations of military discipline that stem from the relationship between the injured servicemember and the military would, at first glance, appear to be quite significant. These types of situations frequently raise issues that many feel the courts should best avoid, such as 77 [t]he peculiar and special relationship of the soldier to his superiors, the effects of the maintenance of suits on discipline, and the extreme results that might obtain if suits under the Tort Claims Act were allowed for negligent orders given or negligent acts committed in the course of military duty. 78 Brown, 348 U.S. at 112, 75 S.Ct. at 143. 79 But in fact, examining a claim's disciplinary ramifications as a separate Feres factor usually does not add very much. It is like adding a handkerchief to a blanket. As a practical matter, in most such cases the military plaintiff would be barred from suing anyway because any claims that raise disciplinary issues relating to the plaintiff almost always fit within the classic workers' compensation paradigm--that is, they arise out of or in the course of the claimant's military employment. In other words, Feres's bar on claims aris[ing] out of or in the course of activity incident to service, 340 U.S. at 146, 71 S.Ct. at 159, understood in the light of its workers' compensation rationale, will almost inevitably keep the judiciary out of matters of military discipline. This is not to say that there aren't cases that raise many questions of military policy. But most, if not all claims that could potentially lead to inappropriate court meddling, would be barred in any event because they are also employment-related. 80 The disciplinary relationship between the government and the injurer is very different. Most of the time it is immaterial for three reasons: the holding in Johnson; the fact that Feres does not bar civilian plaintiffs; and the nature of tort damage awards. 81 The first reason is clearly not dispositive. It neither supports nor undermines a Feres bar, but rather simply points out that the relationship between the injurer and the defendant is not an essential part of the Feres analysis. Johnson tells us that the Feres doctrine can bar a servicemember's claim even if the injurer is not a military employee and, thus, no issues of discipline exist as to the injurer. See Johnson, 481 U.S. at 686, 107 S.Ct. at 2066 (this Court has never suggested that the military status of the tortfeasor is crucial to the application of the doctrine). This may be because the discipline relationship between the military-plaintiff and the government is already so great that a Feres bar is warranted in any event. Or it may rest on one of the original Feres grounds, such as the workers' compensation analogy. 16 82 One might conclude from this that the military-injurer discipline relationship is irrelevant to Feres. But since all Johnson actually says is that a Feres bar may exist absent a military-injurer, the most that it can mean is that a discipline relationship between the military and the injurer is not a necessary condition for Feres to apply. Johnson obviously does not mean that the existence of such a strong discipline relationship could never justify a Feres result. 83 The second reason is more compelling. Feres does not bar suits against the government when the injured plaintiff is a civilian. This remains the case even though the injurer is in the military and military discipline is directly involved. See e.g. Sheridan v. United States, 487 U.S. 392, 401, 108 S.Ct. 2449, 2455, 101 L.Ed.2d 352 (1988) (injured civilian shot by drunken serviceman could sue government under FTCA for navy personnel's negligence in knowingly allowing drunken serviceman to leave navy base with rifle); Doggett, 875 F.2d at 689-95 (government may be held liable under the FTCA for injuries sustained by a civilian as a result of Navy's negligent supervision of drunken personnel); Kohn v. United States, 680 F.2d 922, 926 (2d Cir.1982) ( Feres--though it precluded recovery by the estate of a murdered serviceman--did not bar claims by his bereaved parents for the Army's alleged infliction of emotional distress on them subsequent to their son's death); but cf. Daberkow v. United States, 581 F.2d 785, 788 (9th Cir.1978) (West German air force pilot killed while conducting joint training mission with U.S. Air Force barred by Feres from suing United States Government for alleged Air Force negligence). 84 Accordingly, in any number of civilian cases, the alleged judicial inquiry into (and interference with) military affairs, occurs anyway. And if this interference occurs regularly in any event, it cannot possibly raise the constitutional concerns that warrant tortured statutory construction and judicial abstention. Since this type of alleged interference is part and parcel of ordinary court behavior when the plaintiff is not in the military, it is hard to argue that such routine judicial inquiry must be avoided at all costs simply because plaintiff is in the military. 85 The third and final reason is equally strong. It is difficult to see how FTCA damage awards can, except in the rarest of cases, interfere with a disciplinary relationship between the government and the military tortfeasor. The issue in these cases is typically not whether the military is permitted to do certain things. It is, instead, whether a member of the armed services has behaved negligently or otherwise wrongfully. If that employee committed a tort--did something that if done by a civilian would give rise to liability--and the act was in the scope of government employment, the government is prima facie liable unless something about the injured plaintiff--like military ties--bars liability. If the government is liable the government is held to pay damages. But paying damages does not mean that the military is told by a court that it must do things differently, or even that it must take steps to control its employees. 86 Injunctions and regulations tell people what they must do and what they must not do, and it is these types of intrusions that would entangle courts in military affairs. Tort judgments do neither of these things. Of course, the military or other agencies of government may themselves decide to alter some forms of military behavior as a result of a damage award. But that decision, that interference, is not the court's. Pursuant to the FTCA, courts merely determine whether analogous behavior by a private-sector employee would give rise to some form of fault-based vicarious liability on the part of a private-sector employer. And under the FTCA, courts simply hold that similar harms done by military employees of the government are compensable costs of the military enterprise. Whether or not a particular cost is worth incurring is a decision that the military must make. The dynamics of that subsequent decision, moreover, hardly give rise to the prudential concerns regarding the constitutional separation of powers and the integrity of Article III courts that properly worried Bickel and Wellington. See Lincoln Mills, supra. 87 From all of this, one might expect that disciplinary considerations regarding the injurer's military relationship to the government are usually ignored in Feres cases. Instead, many courts--perhaps misled by the Supreme Court's temporary preoccupation with discipline--have examined the military relationship ostensibly to avoid judicial interference in military matters. Indeed, our own prior decisions have, at times, engaged in just such an analysis. See e.g. Sanchez v. United States, 878 F.2d 633, 638 (2d Cir.1989) (considering the need for Marine Corps officers to testify regarding their policies in hiring allegedly negligent auto repair mechanics); Bozeman v. United States, 780 F.2d 198, 202 (2nd Cir.1985) (considering the need for Army officers to testify regarding their policies in staffing and operating a non-commissioned officers' club). 88 In all these cases, however, there were other grounds that justified a Feres bar--apart from any discipline relationship between the government and injurer. Either the first two Feres factors or, at times, a crucial discipline relationship between the injured plaintiff and the military, were present and sufficiently explained why Feres applied. See Sanchez, 878 F.2d at 637 (facility at which the alleged negligence occurred was open only to a limited class of military or military related patrons and thus was an incident of plaintiff's military employment); Bozeman, 780 F.2d at 201 (plaintiff's decedent was only entitled to be in the NCO club because he had the appropriate rank, was a member of the Army and was on active duty status and thus his drinking fell squarely within the scope of his employment). And for the doctrine to survive in a coherent way, we conclude that the district courts would do best to look primarily to these other grounds--just as the Supreme Court did in both Brooks and Feres. 89 Still, there are some very rare cases in which injurer discipline is crucial, and Feres, as it has developed, has left room for them. The doctrine provides a safeguard against the odd case in which truly significant issues of discipline are at stake, and in which, for unusual reasons, the other factors do not result in a Feres bar. In such rare and remarkable cases a discipline relationship, whether between the government and the plaintiff or even between the government and the injurer, is by itself enough to warrant a Feres bar. 90 In Shearer the Supreme Court applied Feres to bar a mother's FTCA suit for the kidnapping and murder of her son, an off-duty soldier who was off base at the time of his abduction. See 473 U.S. at 53-54, 105 S.Ct. at 3040-41. The mother complained that the Army failed to exert a reasonably sufficient control over her son's assailant, a soldier who had a prior record of violent crime. Id. Concluding that the mother's claim struck at the core of military discipline, id. at 58, 105 S.Ct. at 3043 (This allegation goes directly to the 'management' of the military; it calls into question basic choices about discipline, supervision, and control of a serviceman), the Court invoked the Feres doctrine. The decision in Shearer emphasized 91 [t]hat to permit this type of suit would mean that commanding officers would have to stand prepared to convince a civilian court of the wisdom of a wide range of military and disciplinary decisions; for example, whether to overlook a particular incident or episode, whether to discharge a serviceman, and whether and how to place restraints on a soldier's off-base conduct. 92 Id. 93 Significantly, the Supreme Court specifically distinguished the negligence alleged in the operation of a vehicle from the type of claim that gave rise to the serious disciplinary issues that concerned it in Shearer. Id. Thus Shearer seems properly to represent the rare case that warrants a free standing disciplinary basis for a Feres bar. As such, it correctly defined itself as the exception rather than the rule. 17 94 We do not doubt that safeguarding the integrity of military discipline can be an appropriate basis for justifying, or at least rationalizing, the Court's construction of the FTCA in Feres. And if the Supreme Court had stuck to its guns after Shearer, and continued to exclude all other factors, we would have been quite disciplined in our subsequent approach. But after Johnson, which reaffirmed the desirability of a uniform federal rule and the existence of a statutory compensation system as proper Feres considerations, we feel more at liberty to examine the relative importance of each factor and the necessary interplay between them. That examination reveals that discipline considerations, crucial as they may be, need not play an independent role in the majority of cases. Where discipline issues involve the plaintiff and the military, their demands are usually already met by complying with the other factors. Where the discipline issues involve the injurer and the military, they are only relevant in the extreme case, like Shearer, as Shearer itself suggests.