Court Opinion

ID: 9483930
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:36:03.485036+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:55.703737
License: Public Domain

SHEDD, District Judge,
concurring:
The application of the discretionary function exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act is a very difficult area of the law. This exception is not defined in the statute and courts have struggled with applying the exception to unlimited factual circumstances.
The purpose of the discretionary function exception can be stated easily enough. It was enacted to protect against judicial second-guessing of policy judgments, which are those decisions grounded in social, economic, and political policy. However, Justice Scalia is undoubtedly correct when he says lower courts have had difficulty in applying the test of whether the choice is an exercise of “policy judgment.” United States v. Gaubert, — U.S.---, 111 S.Ct. 1267, 1280 (1991).
This Court today rules that the judgment involved in choosing the materials for the construction of a bridge guardrail is a policy judgment, exempted from judicial scrutiny by the discretionary function exception. Under this analysis, a person injured as a result of the government’s defective design or construction of any infrastructure will be unable to recover against the government, unless there was a breach of a specific safety standard mandated by a federal statute or regulation. As a result, government agencies may well be discouraged from enacting mandatory regulations governing the design and construction of infrastructure in order to claim immunity under the umbrella of the discretionary function exception.
Although I believe the concurrence by Justice Scalia in Gaubert presents a more appropriate framework for analyzing the discretionary function exception, I agree that this Court has correctly applied the analysis set forth in Gaubert. Therefore, I concur with the results reached in this case.