Opinion ID: 6216611
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: A Detailed Statute Preempts General Remedies

Text: As an initial matter, our analysis is governed by “the wellestablished principle that, in most contexts, ‘a precisely drawn, detailed statute pre-empts more general remedies.’” Hinck v. United States, 550 U.S. 501, 506 (2007) (quoting EC Term of Years Tr. v. 8 We’d note, by the way, that the only courts to have considered this question—whether the Government waived its sovereign immunity under the OPA—have agreed that the OPA contains no such waiver. See Rick Franklin Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 2008 WL 337978, at  (D. Or. Feb. 4, 2008) (“The OPA does not contain a waiver of the government’s sovereign immunity from suit.”); Int’l Marine Carriers v. Oil Spill Liab. Tr. Fund, 903 F. Supp. 1097, 1102 (S.D. Tex. 1994) (“Nothing in OPA section[s] 2712, 2713, or 2715 can be construed as a waiver of sovereign immunity.”). USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 28 of 50 28 Opinion of the Court 21-10745 United States, 550 U.S. 429, 433 (2007)). The Supreme Court has held, for instance, that “whe[re] Congress enacts a specific remedy . . . when previous remedies were ‘problematic,’ the remedy provided is generally regarded as exclusive.” Id. (quoting Block v. N.D. ex rel. Bd. of Univ. & Sch. Lands, 461 U.S. 273, 285 (1983)). And that makes sense: when the legislature has attacked a specific problem—and crafted a detailed and precise remedy to address that problem—we should generally assume that the law represents Congress’s considered and exclusive judgment on that issue. Imagine a local municipality that promulgates two ordinances. The first provides a cause of action for trespass against any person who encroaches on private land. The second provides a cause of action for trespass against any police officer and outlines a limited set of circumstances in which the cause of action may be asserted—e.g., only when the officer was operating outside of his jurisdiction, was off duty, or was acting in violation of constitutional constraints. We think it beyond peradventure to say that a plaintiff in our city looking to sue a police officer for trespass could assert a claim only under the latter (more specific) ordinance—and not under the general trespass law. Otherwise, what purpose would the second ordinance serve? And that’s pretty much what happened here. In 1990, Congress enacted a detailed—and precisely drawn—statute that governed almost every aspect of an oil-spill cleanup. As we’ve explained, the OPA assigns initial liability to the vessel owner, 33 U.S.C. § 2702; places caps on—and offers complete defenses to— USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 29 of 50 21-10745 Opinion of the Court 29 that liability for parties who act responsibly, id. §§ 2703, 2704; outlines the contours of available contribution claims, id. § 2709; creates an industry-financed Fund to limit the burden on taxpayers, id. § 2712; and assigns jurisdiction, venue, and time limitations for claims arising under the statute, id. § 2717. Congress didn’t draw up this carefully balanced design—a veritable super-structure of oilcleanup rights, duties, and obligations—for no reason. It did it to strike the right incentives within the oil industry itself—incentives the previous regime had, in Congress’s estimation, failed to drive home. This detailed scheme thus preempts the general oil-removal remedies that might’ve been available under either the common law or the SAA. In similar circumstances, courts have routinely reached this same conclusion. Take United States v. Bormes, 568 U.S. 6 (2012), for instance. There, the plaintiff sued the government under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. In doing so, the plaintiff attempted to invoke a waiver of sovereign immunity from a different statute, the Little Tucker Act. The Little Tucker Act, like the SAA, doesn’t create a cause of action against the federal government—but only waives sovereign immunity for certain “claim[s] against the United States, not exceeding $10,000.” 28 U.S.C. § 1346(a)(2). Given the comprehensiveness of the FCRA’s remedial scheme, the Supreme Court refused to allow the plaintiff to sue the United States. In this way, it recognized—as we do—that “a precisely drawn, detailed statute pre-empts more general remedies.” Bormes, 568 U.S. at 12– 13. It then found that the FCRA created just such a “detailed USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 30 of 50 30 Opinion of the Court 21-10745 remedial scheme” because its provisions “set out a carefully circumscribed, time-limited, plaintiff-specific cause of action,” “precisely define the appropriate forum,” prescribe “a specified limitations period,” and vest “jurisdiction” in certain courts. Id. at 15 (cleaned up). It concluded: [O]ur precedents collectively stand for a more basic proposition: Where a specific statutory scheme provides the accoutrements of a judicial action, the metes and bounds of the liability Congress intended to create can only be divined from the text of the statute itself. . . . Since FCRA is a detailed remedial scheme, only its own text can determine whether the damages liability Congress crafted extends to the Federal Government. To hold otherwise—to permit plaintiffs to remedy the absence of a waiver of sovereign immun- ity in specific, detailed statutes by pleading general Tucker Act jurisdiction—would transform the sovereign-immunity landscape. Id. at 14–15. Our case is just the same. The OPA is a “detailed remedial scheme” that “provides the accoutrements of a judicial action.” It carefully balances (and neatly circumscribes) liability for oil-removal claims. See generally 33 U.S.C. §§ 2702, 2703, 2704, 2709. It mandates time limits for bringing covered claims under the statute. Id. § 2717(f) (prescribing a three-year statute of limitations for “an action for damages under this Act,” “[a]n action for recovery of USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 31 of 50 21-10745 Opinion of the Court 31 removal costs,” an “action for contribution for any removal costs or damages,” and an “action based on rights subrogated pursuant to this Act”). It precisely defines the forum in which any such action must be brought, noting that “[v]enue shall lie in any district in which the discharge or injury or damages occurred, or in which the defendant resides, may be found, has its principal office, or has appointed an agent for service of process.” Id. § 2717(b). And it lists the courts that may lawfully exercise subject-matter jurisdiction over its claims, providing (for instance) that “the United States district courts shall have exclusive original jurisdiction over all controversies arising under this Act, without regard to the citizenship of the parties or the amount in controversy.” Id. Like the statute at issue in Bormes, then, the OPA is a “detailed remedial scheme” that constitutes the exclusive source of liability for oil-removal claims. Whether oil-spill liability extends to the federal government, in other words, must be determined by the OPA’s own text. 9 9 There is, it’s true, one difference between our case and Bormes—one neither party seems to notice. In Bormes, the plaintiff brought his case under the FCRA and attempted to “mix and match” its FCRA cause of action with the Little Tucker Act’s sovereign-immunity waiver. Our Plaintiff, by contrast, doesn’t assert any claim under the OPA. Instead, it advances a claim under federal maritime law and relies on the SAA for its waiver of sovereign immunity—something it unquestionably can do as a general matter. This, though, is a difference without much significance—at least for our purposes. That’s because Bormes turned on the longstanding (and broader) rule that a precisely drawn and detailed statutory scheme preempts an older, more-general set of remedies. And that’s exactly what happened in our case: once the precisely USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 32 of 50 32 Opinion of the Court 21-10745 Or take the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. General Services Administration, 425 U.S. 820 (1976). That case required the Court to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “provides the exclusive judicial remedy for claims of discrimination in federal employment.” Id. at 821. After a deep-dive into the law and its history, the Court determined that the “structure of the [statute] fully confirms the conclusion that Congress intended it to be exclusive and pre-emptive.” Id. at 829. In reaching this result, the Court pointed to the “balance, completeness, and structural integrity” of the statutory scheme and noted that the law “proscribes federal employment discrimination and establishes an administrative and judicial enforcement system,” which includes— for instance—“certain preconditions” (like EEOC exhaustion). Id. at 832. The OPA does all of those things. As we’ve said, it prescribes where to sue and when. 33 U.S.C. § 2717. But it does much more than that: It sets out a detailed “[c]laims procedure” that governs actions against responsible parties, requiring that (other than in limited circumstances) “all claims for removal costs or damages shall be presented first to the responsible party” before the claimant can present its claim in court or to the Fund in a manner approved by the President. Id. § 2713(a), (e); see generally 33 C.F.R. § 136.105 (setting out the “[g]eneral requirements for a claim” under the drawn—and detailed—OPA came into being, plaintiffs like Savage could no longer invoke general maritime law (in conjunction with the SAA) to create a cause of action for oil-removal costs against the federal government. USCA11 Case: 21-10745 Date Filed: 02/08/2022 Page: 33 of 50 21-10745 Opinion of the Court 33 OPA). On Savage’s view, however, a claimant can avoid all of these steps by simply asserting its claims under general admiralty law in federal court. To quote the Supreme Court: “[i]t would require the suspension of disbelief to ascribe to Congress the design to allow its careful and thorough remedial scheme to be circumvented by artful pleading.” Brown, 425 U.S. at 833.