Opinion ID: 687261
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The History of Feres

Text: 39 The Feres doctrine started lucidly enough as a rule that barred servicemember's claims under the FTCA for injuries that arise out of or are [sustained] in the course of activity incident to service. Feres, 340 U.S. at 146, 71 S.Ct. at 159. This language, which derived from the words characteristically found in both state and federal workers' compensation statutes, was not chosen accidentally. Indeed, at its inception, the rule in Feres is best understood as an attempt to preclude suits by servicemembers against the government because, as military employees, they received government disability and death benefits--benefits that the Court observed were similar to (and if anything more generous than) most civilian workers' compensation awards. See Feres, 340 U.S. at 145, 71 S.Ct. at 158-59. 40 Then, as now, civilian workers' compensation statutes typically barred tort suits by employees against their employers for injuries arising out of or in the course of employment. See Harper & James Sec. 11.2 (The compensation under these [state and federal] acts is usually the exclusive remedy of the employee and dependents against the employer, in lieu of any amounts that might otherwise have been recovered in a lawsuit for injuries covered by the acts.); Arthur Larson & Lex K. Larson, The Law of Workermen's Compensation, Sec. 65.30 (1994) [hereinafter Larson on Workmen's Compensation]. It must have seemed reasonable to the Supreme Court to treat military employees in a similar manner. After all, treating like cases alike is the great engine of the law. 41 That such a reading of the FTCA was exceedingly willful, and flew directly in the face of a relatively recent statute's language and legislative history, see generally, United States v. Johnson, 481 U.S. 681, 692-703, 107 S.Ct. 2063, 2069-75, 95 L.Ed.2d 648 (1987) (Scalia, J., dissenting), apparently did not trouble the Court much--intent, as it was, to make the FTCA fit the legal landscape of the time. 5 Indeed, in this regard, it is particularly noteworthy that in 1949, one year before the Court decided Feres, Congress had amended the Federal Employees' Compensation Act specifically to preclude covered federal employees from maintaining personal injury and wrongful death suits under the FTCA. See Larson on Workermen's Compensation at Sec. 65.33 (citing 5 U.S.C. Sec. 8116(c)). 42 It may occasionally be desirable for courts to pressure legislatures to reconsider outdated statutes so that, unless the legislatures make clear their continued preference for disparate treatment, like cases may be treated alike. See generally, Guido Calabresi, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes (1982). Although apparently this was precisely what the Court was doing in Feres, its willingness to ignore language, history, and the process of incremental law making (not to mention possible ways of dialoguing with Congress to discern the legislature's actual intent) was nevertheless remarkable. In any event, none of these considerations seemed to matter to the Court which seemingly concluded that the federal systems of simple, certain and uniform compensation for injuries or death in the armed services, Feres, 340 U.S. at 144, 71 S.Ct. at 158, should be, like workers' compensation laws, an injured servicemember's sole source of recovery. Id. at 143, 71 S.Ct. at 157-58. 43 Despite its willful and arguably misguided origins, Feres would have been both easy enough to understand and to follow had it actually been applied to all servicemembers who benefited from the simple, certain, and uniform [system of government] compensation. Later courts might have taken comfort in Congress' apparent acquiescence in the Supreme Court's construction of the FTCA, see Johnson, 481 U.S. at 686 & n. 6, 107 S.Ct. at 2066 & n. 6, even though such reliance on legislative inaction is rarely sound given the degree of inertia that is intentionally built into our system of checks and balances. See id. at 702-03, 107 S.Ct. at 2075 (Scalia, J., dissenting). And in time, the willfulness of the Court's decision in Feres would have been forgotten, especially if it had achieved treatment for military personnel that was, in fact, like the treatment accorded to the great mass of civilian employees. But such a result seemingly did not come about. 44 Instead Feres quickly lurched toward incoherence. Part of the problem lay with Brooks v. United States, 337 U.S. 49, 69 S.Ct. 918, 93 L.Ed. 1200 (1949), a case that had immediately preceded Feres. In Brooks, the Supreme Court permitted recovery under the FTCA to two servicemen, the Brooks brothers, who had been on furlough, driving along the highway, under compulsion of no orders or duty and on no military mission [when] a government owned and operated vehicle collided with [them]. Feres, 340 U.S. at 146, 71 S.Ct. at 159. Attempting to distinguish its previous holding in Brooks, the Feres court noted that [t]he injury to Brooks did not arise out of or in the course of military duty, and that the Brooks's relationship [to the government] while on leave was not analogous to that of a soldier injured while performing duties under orders. Id. 45 But the plaintiffs in Brooks were eligible for precisely the same set of government benefits as were the plaintiffs in Feres, and indeed they originally collected them in addition to receiving their FTCA awards. See Brooks, 337 U.S. at 53-54, 69 S.Ct. at 920-21 (remanding the case for further proceedings to determine whether and by how much Brooks's FTCA judgment should be off-set by their/his military disability benefits). This fact immediately placed Brooks in tension with Feres. For if the existence of a military death and disability compensation scheme was to be the singular rationale for precluding servicemembers from asserting tort claims against the government, Feres should have overruled Brooks. 46 But Feres neither overruled Brooks, nor limited Brooks to its immediate facts. Indeed, the Supreme Court and several circuit courts (without reproof from the Supreme Court), have subsequently applied Brooks rather than Feres, and allowed FTCA claims in a significant number of cases in which the injured plaintiffs were fully covered by the government's compensation scheme. See e.g. United States v. Brown, 348 U.S. 110, 112, 75 S.Ct. 141, 143, 99 L.Ed. 139 (1954) (Brooks held controlling where veteran sued Veteran's Administration hospital for malpractice in treating an injury sustained while plaintiff was in military service); Harvey v. United States, 884 F.2d 857, 861 (5th Cir.1989) (despite the fact that serviceman [i]ndisputably ... received some compensation from the military during the time he was on medical hold he was permitted to sue for injuries sustained due to military medical malpractice); Cortez v. United States, 854 F.2d 723, 727 (5th Cir.1988) (At the time of serviceman's death due to military medical malpractice, he was on the Temporary Disability Retirement List, was receiving disability pay and was eligible for treatment in government hospital. Neither benefit [was] sufficient to warrant a Feres bar.); Johnson v. United States, 704 F.2d 1431, 1441 n. 6 (9th Cir.1983) ($1.5 million in Veterans Act benefits deducted from serviceman's $3.5 million FTCA award); Rinelli v. United States, 706 F.Supp. 190, 194 (E.D.N.Y.1988) (serviceman on Temporary Disability Retirement List and receiving military benefits permitted to sue under FTCA for military medical malpractice); Cooper v. Perkiomen Airways, Ltd., 609 F.Supp. 969, 972 (E.D.Pa.1985) (serviceman's widow permitted to sue government for husband's death that resulted from negligence of federal air traffic controllers even though she received military compensation benefits). 47 Had the decision in Feres offered any other rationale that provided guidance in determining which cases should follow its own holding as opposed to Brooks, this split in authority would not have been problematic. Unfortunately, it did not. 48 Feres did mention two other reasons for its holding, besides the statutory benefits rationale. But neither of them was particularly helpful. First, the Court concluded that government liability in a case like Feres was not analogous to any liability of a private individual and, hence, was not permitted by the FTCA. See 340 U.S. at 141-42, 71 S.Ct. at 157 (FTCA did not authorize the creation of new causes of action but [government] acceptance of liability under circumstances that would bring private liability into existence). This explanation was highly questionable, however, and in any event, did not provide a sensible way to distinguish Brooks. Moreover, the Court abandoned it almost immediately after Feres, and has never resurrected it. See Rayonier, Inc. v. United States, 352 U.S. 315, 319, 77 S.Ct. 374, 376-77, 1 L.Ed.2d 354 (1957) (federal government not immune under the FTCA for negligence of United States Forest Service employees); Indian Towing Co. v. United States, 350 U.S. 61, 64-65, 76 S.Ct. 122, 124-25, 100 L.Ed. 48 (1955) (rejecting claim that United States is not liable under FTCA for the negligent performance of 'uniquely governmental functions' ). 49 The Court's second rationale in Feres was that all military personnel should be subject to a uniform rule governing compensation for injuries sustained while in the service. See Feres, 340 U.S. at 142-43, 71 S.Ct. at 157-58. In offering this explanation, the Court noted that [t]he relationship between the government and members of its armed forces is 'distinctively federal in character.'  Id. at 143, 71 S.Ct. at 158. The Court further mentioned that the significant variation in tort recoveries that would inevitably result from the FTCA's lex loci provision would be inequitable in the military context. Id. at 142-43, 71 S.Ct. at 157-58. 50 Although this uniformity rationale was intelligible, it neither explained Feres's bar on tort suits nor accounted for the holding in Brooks. After all, if the impetus for Feres was the idea that all FTCA claims by military personnel should be controlled by a uniform federal law, then one would not have expected Feres to bar all such claims without discussion. It would have been just as plausible for the Court to have begun developing a uniform federal common law of torts--analogous, say, to admiralty--that would be applied to military claims and that would subsequently be articulated on a case-by-case basis by the lower courts. 51 Instead, Feres did preclude FTCA suits by military personnel, and further suggested that the government compensation system was the applicable uniform federal remedy. See 340 U.S. at 144, 71 S.Ct. at 158. This step created a logical inconsistency because this same uniform federal remedy applied to the plaintiffs in Brooks as well, and yet they were not barred by it from bringing a FTCA tort suit. Had the court chosen to create a federal common law, later courts might have distinguished Brooks from Feres on the grounds that the plaintiffs in Brooks--unlike those in Feres--were sufficiently removed from military duty so that uniformity of federal law was neither required nor, perhaps, even appropriate. Military plaintiffs would, in both instances, have tort remedies. Those whose accidents were closely linked to the government, would be covered by a uniform federal tort law. Those further removed would be bound by variable state tort rules. 52 Given the absence of any seemingly consistent rationale in Feres itself, it is not surprising that the Court soon developed a new, after-the-fact explanation for its holding. In United States v. Brown, the Court recharacterized Feres and said: 53 The peculiar and special relationship of the soldier to his superiors, the effects of the maintenance of such suits on discipline, and the extreme results that obtain if suits under the Tort Claims Act were allowed for the negligent acts committed in the course of military duty led [us] to read the Act as excluding claims of this character. 54 Brown, 348 U.S. at 112, 75 S.Ct. at 143. 55 With this new spin, the Court interpreted Feres to preclude some, but not all, actions in order to keep courts from second guessing military policies and to prevent their likely interference with military discipline. This explanation had two advantages. 56 First, it seemed to justify a distinction between Brooks and Feres. As the Court had already noted in Feres, Brooks' father, riding in the same car recovered for his injuries.... 340 U.S. at 146, 71 S.Ct. at 159. This fact implied that the Brooks brothers' own FTCA recovery--given the time, place, and manner of their injuries--involved no more military second guessing or interference with discipline than did their civilian father's award. 57 Second, by linking Feres to discipline the Court tied into a line of influential scholarship, emerging at the time, that offered both an explanation and justification (albeit retrospective) for its otherwise extraordinarily willful refusal to follow the language and probable intent of the FTCA. Professors Alexander Bickel and Harry Wellington, for example, in a celebrated article, argued that federal courts are justified in refusing to comply with federal laws that apparently require them to behave in ways that are so inappropriate for judicial bodies as to raise structural constitutional questions. See, Alexander M. Bickel & Harry H. Wellington, Legislative Purpose and the Judicial Process: The Lincoln Mills Case, 71 Harv.L.Rev. 1 (1957). They contended that in such situations courts should find ways to avoid acting, even if such avoidance involves tortured statutory construction. Only if Congress expressly requires them to do so should courts act in such cases. Even then, it is preferable that Congress make its will known after the courts have given warning of the constitutional dangers at stake. 6 58 In later writings, Professor Bickel, in particular, developed this theme further. See, e.g., Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch (2d ed. 1986); Alexander M. Bickel, The Passive Virtues, 75 Harv.L.Rev. 40 (1961). The importance of his approach, both in this country and abroad, is obvious. See, e.g., Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474, 506-07, 79 S.Ct. 1400, 1418-19, 3 L.Ed.2d 1377 (1959) (finding that a loyalty security program established administratively, which did not permit confrontation of witnesses, was unlawful without explicit executive or congressional authority); Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116, 128-29, 78 S.Ct. 1113, 1119-20, 2 L.Ed.2d 1204 (1958) (Congressional delegation of power to issue passports to Secretary of State did not give the Secretary unbridled discretion to deny communists passports without explicit Congressional authorization); cf. Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U.S. 109, 137-40, 79 S.Ct. 1081, 1100, 3 L.Ed.2d 1115 (1959) (Black, J., dissenting) (If Congress wants ideas investigated, if it even wants them investigated in the field of education, it must be prepared to say so expressly and unequivocally.); see also Can. Const. (Constitution Act, 1982) pt. I (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms), Sec. 33 (Canadian non-obstante clause providing that legislature may abrogate enumerated rights that are provisionally enforced by the Supreme Court provided that the legislature explicitly decides to do so). 59 Interfering with military discipline and second-guessing military policy are two activities that fit comfortably in a list of things that courts should try to avoid doing if at all possible. Perhaps for this reason, or perhaps for the want of any other seemingly coherent explanation, the disciplinary reading of Feres took hold and in time became dominant. See United States v. Shearer, 473 U.S. 52, 57, 105 S.Ct. 3039, 3042, 87 L.Ed.2d 38 (1985) (stating that Feres seems best explained by the discipline rationale) (quoting United States v. Muniz, 374 U.S. 150, 162, 83 S.Ct. 1850, 1858, 10 L.Ed.2d 805 (1963)). Indeed, at one point in the doctrine's recent development, the Supreme Court suggested that the other rationales--the existence of the federal compensation scheme and the desirability of a uniform federal rule--were no longer controlling. Shearer, 473 U.S. at 58 n. 4, 105 S.Ct. at 3043 n. 4.