Court Opinion

ID: 9429528
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:27:02.545582+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:20.090717
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
dissenting.
The Government’s construction of 28 U. S. C. § 2680(c) is not the one that “first springs” to my mind. Ante, at 854. Rather, I read the exception for claims arising “in respect of . . . the detention of any goods” as expressing Congress’ intent to preclude liability attributable to the temporary interference with the owner’s possession of his goods, as opposed to liability for physical damage to his goods. That seems to me to be the normal reading of the statutory language that Congress employed, and the one that most Members of Congress voting on the proposal would have given it. Moreover, my reading, unlike the Court’s,1 is supported by an examina*863tion of the language used in other exceptions. Congress did not use the words “arising out of” in § 2680(c) but did use those words in three other subsections of the same section of the Act. See §§ 2680(b), (e), and (h). Absent persuasive evidence to the contrary, we should assume that when Congress uses different language in a series of similar provisions, it intends to express a different intention.
The language of the statute itself is thus clear enough to persuade me that Congress did not intend to exempt this property damage claim from the broad coverage of the Act. I would, of course, agree that if there were legislative history plainly identifying a contrary congressional intent, that history should be given effect. I do not believe, however, that it is proper for the Court to attach any weight at all to the kind of “clues” to legislative intent that it discusses, or to its concept of the “general purposes” that motivated various exceptions to the statute. Because the Court has done so, however, I shall respond to both parts of its rather creative approach to statutory construction.
HH
In the entire 15-year history preceding the enactment of the Tort Claims Act in 1946, the Court finds only two “clues” that it believes shed any light on the meaning of § 2680(c). The first — the so-called “Holtzoff Report” — is nothing but an internal Justice Department working paper prepared in 1931 and never even mentioned in the legislative history of the 1946 Act. There is no indication that any Congressman ever heard of the document or knew that it even existed. The position of the majority — that it is “significant” that the “apparent draftsman” of the relevant language himself “believed that it would bar a suit of the sort brought by petitioner,” ante, at 856-857 — is manifestly ill-advised. The intent of a lobbyist — no matter how public spirited he may have been— should not be attributed to the Congress without positive evidence that elected .legislators were aware of and shared the lobbyist’s intent.
*864Unless we know more about the collective legislative purpose than can be gleaned from an internal document prepared by a person who was seeking legislative action, we should be guided by the sensible statement that “in construing a statute . . . the worst person to construe it is the person who is responsible for its drafting. He is very much disposed to confuse what he intended to do with the effect of the language which in fact has been employed.” Hilder v. Dexter, [1902] A. C. 474, 477 (Halsbury, L. C., abstaining).2 If the draftsman of the language in question intended it to cover such cases as this one, he failed.
The second “clue” relied upon by the majority consists of a brief summary in the House Committee Report which casu*865ally uses the prepositional phrase “arising out of” to introduce a truncated list of the exceptions. Ante, at 857. But the “casual” use of the latter phrase in the Committee Report is as understandable as it is insignificant. It is nothing more than an introduction. In such an introduction, precision of meaning is naturally and knowingly sacrificed in the interest of brevity.
II
The Court’s reliance on the “general purposes” for creating exceptions does nothing more than explain why Congress might reasonably have decided to create this exception.3 Those purposes are no more persuasive than the general purposes motivating the enactment of the broad waiver of sovereign immunity effected by the statute itself.
The hypothetical rationales attributed to Congress by the majority are also internally inconsistent. If Congress, as a matter of public policy, determined that these claims should not be entertained because of the possibility for fraud, the majority’s suggestion that petitioner may have a remedy *866under the Tucker Act is quite inexplicable.4 Similarly, if Congress “may well have wished not to dampen the enforcement efforts of the Service by exposing the Government to private damages suits by disgruntled owners of detained property,” ante, at 859 (emphasis added), its failure to abrogate the common-law remedy against the individual customs officer is inexplicable. For I would assume that customs officers’ enforcement efforts would be dampened far more by a threat of personal liability than by a threat of governmental liability. Reliance on an assumed reluctance to waive immunity regarding claims for which “adequate” remedies were already available simply begs the question. A basic reason for the Tort Claims Act was, of course, the inadequacy of the existing remedies, and there is no indication in the legislative history that Congress considered the previous remedies in this specific area adequate.
A discussion of the general reasons for drafting exceptions to the Act is no more enlightening regarding the specific exception at issue here than a consideration of the principal purpose that Congress sought to achieve by enacting this important reform legislation.
Tort claims bills had floundered on legislative shoals for nearly two decades.5 A general waiver of sovereign immu*867nity for torts was finally propelled into law by the legislative reform movement which culminated in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. E. g., United States v. Yellow Cab Co., 340 U. S. 543, 549-550 (1951). The “overwhelming purpose” of the Congress which enacted the Tort Claims Act was to remove the burden of dealing with tort claims from Congress which had adjudicated these claims in the form of passing private bills, and the “reports at that session omitted previous discussions which tended to restrict the scope of the Tort Claims bill.” Ibid. Hence, the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress recommended that “Congress delegate authority to the Federal Courts and to the Court of Claims to hear and settle claims against the Federal Government,” explaining its recommendation, and the shortcomings of resolving such claims through consideration of private bills, as follows:
“Congress is poorly equipped to serve as a judicial tribunal for the settlement of private claims against the Government of the United States. This method of handling individual claims does not work well either for the Government or for the individual claimant, while the cost of legislating the settlement in many cases far exceeds the total amounts involved.
“Long delays in consideration of claims against the Government, time consumed by the Claims Committees *868of the House and Senate, and crowded private calendars combine to make this an inefficient method of procedure.
“The United States courts are well able and equipped to hear these claims and to decide them with justice and equity both to the Government and to the claimants....” Report of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress pursuant to H. Con. Res. 18, S. Rep. No. 1011, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 25 (1946), H. R. Rep. No. 1675, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 25 (1946).6
If our construction of the narrow provision before us is to be determined by reference to broad purposes, in the context of the 1946 Act the exceptions are best rationalized by reference to Congress’ central purpose. Absent specific legislative history pertaining to the sort of claims involved in this case, the general bases for exceptions relied upon by the majority are surely less persuasive than the overwhelming purpose of the statute. Courts of law have been up to the task of discovering fraud for centuries; it is completely unrealistic *869to suggest that Congress did not think the judiciary up to this task, or that it wanted to reserve such cases for its own adjudication because it is better equipped to weed out fraudulent claims.
In the final analysis, one must conclude that the legislative history provides only the most general guidance on resolving the issue in this case. For any basic policy argument in favor of making an exception will support a broad construction of the provision in question, just as any basic policy argument in favor of the Act’s waiver of sovereign immunity will support a narrow construction of this or any other exception. The Government’s policy arguments respecting the administrative burden on the Customs Service and the potential for fraudulent claims, like petitioner’s policy arguments, are “properly addressed to Congress, not to this Court.” Ante, at 862.
Ill
Therefore, this is “a case for applying the canon of construction of the wag who said, when the legislative history is doubtful, go to the statute.” Greenwood v. United States, 350 U. S. 366, 374 (1956). I would acknowledge — indeed I do acknowledge — that the Court’s reading of the statutory language is entirely plausible. I would, however, tilt the scales in favor of recovery by attaching some weight to the particular language used in § 2680(c). And I must disagree with the Court’s reliance on the general purposes underlying exceptions when no consideration is given to the general purpose of the statute itself. But most importantly, I would eschew any reliance on the intent of the lobbyist whose opinion on the question before us was not on the public record.
I therefore respectfully dissent.

 The majority maintains that “ ‘any claim arising in respect of’ the detention of goods means any claim ‘arising out of’ the detention of goods, and includes a claim resulting from negligent handling or storage of detained property.” Ante, at 854.

 The majority’s analysis, it should be observed, puts the cart before the horse.
“The essence of bill drafting is placing a legislative proposal in the proper legal phraseology and form to achieve congressional intent. It is primarily a task of legal analysis and research rather than of composition. . . .Framing the legal language to embody congressional purpose is not as difficult as ascertaining what that purpose is in its entirety. While a committee (or individual member of Congress, as the case may be) is in the process of working out what it wants to do, the legislative counsel assist it by explaining the effect of alternative proposals. Even after the committee (or Congressman) has settled upon the major outlines of a measure, subsidiary policy questions seem to unfold endlessly. The legislative counsel must point up all of those for the committee (or Congressman) to decide. To accomplish that, the legislative counsel must envisage the broad application of the proposed law in all of its ramifications.” K. Kofmehl, Professional Staffs of Congress 189 (3d ed. 1977) (footnote omitted).
Many bills are of course initially drafted in the Executive Branch. After today’s decision, we can anticipate executive agencies searching long dormant files for documents similar to the Holtzoff Report. We can also anticipate that private parties will attempt to capitalize on this new reservoir of “legislative” history as well, through discovery and perhaps the Freedom of Information Act. In light of the Government’s reliance on the Holtzoff Report, presumably it will not assert that this kind of material is privileged when private parties are in search of “legislative” intent.
Finally, the language in some bills is initially drafted by private lobbyists. One doubts that the majority would find “significant” the intention of such a draftsman when that intention was not shared with the Congress.

 Some of the majority’s ipse dixit about the Customs Service does merit response. We are told, for example, without citation to any authority, much less any statements in the legislative history, that the Customs Service does not have the staff or resources to inspect the goods it detains. Ante, at 859. Notwithstanding the fact that it appears the Service undertakes such inspections now to some extent, see U. S. Customs Service, Customs Inspector Handbook, §§ 3.55(b), 5.72 (1982); see generally 19 CFR §§ 158.21-158.30 (1983), one wonders what the staff which detain the items are doing with them if not inspecting them, why they cannot make a record of the condition of the goods, why this burden would be onerous, and why the Congress would want Government officials charged -with custody of a citizen’s property to be free from this burden that any reasonably prudent person under the circumstances would undertake. The answer, or so it would seem, is that the “Government, as a defendant, can exert an unctuous persuasiveness because it can clothe official carelessness with a public interest. Hence, one of the unanticipated consequences of the Tort Claims Act has been to throw the weight of government influence on the side of lax standards of care in the negligence cases which it defends.” Dalehite v. United States, 346 U. S. 15, 50 (1953) (Jackson, J., dissenting).

 Cf. Feres v. United States, 340 U. S. 136, 139 (1950) (“This Act, however, should be construed to fit, so far as will comport with its words, into the entire statutory system of remedies against the Government to make a workable, consistent and equitable whole. The Tort Claims Act was not an isolated and spontaneous flash of congressional generosity. It marks the culmination of a long effort to mitigate unjust consequences of sovereign immunity from suit”).

 The majority largely relies on the legislative history of bills which were never enacted into law. All legislation has it germinal period, but the intentions of the proponents of previous legislation which was never enacted are at most a secondary aid to construing the intent of those that enacted a descendant of it. The earlier legislation may have failed to be enacted for a variety of reasons, of course, but one reason for failure is that the reasons *867offered by the proponents were unconvincing to the majority of the Congress. The same proposal may be justified on different rationales, however, and it is the rationale of the Congress which enacts a measure which defines congressional purpose and intent. In the context of the Federal Tort Claims Act, we have recognized the extremely limited utility, and sometimes misleading nature, of reliance upon the legislative history of the plethora of earlier tort claims bills which failed to command a consensus, acknowledging that the measure ultimately enacted was presented to the Congress in a “new aspect” when it become Part IV of the proposed Legislative Reorganization Act. United States v. Yellow Cab Co., 340 U. S. 543, 550-552, and n. 8 (1951).

 See, e. g., S. Rep. No. 1400, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 29-31 (1946); see also Dalehite v. United States, 346 U. S., at 24-25; United States v. Yellow Cab Co., 340 U. S., at 548-550 (The Federal Tort Claims Act “merely substitutes the District Courts for Congress as the agency to determine the validity and amount of [tort] claims.” Id., at 549); Feres v. United States, supra, at 140.
The Tort Claims Act was one part of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946. The Legislative Reorganization Act was the product of a year of work by the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress. E. g., S. Rep. No. 1400, supra, at 1. The Joint Committee, however, was not empowered to report legislation. See H. Con. Res. 18, 79th Cong., 1st Sess. (1945). The bill embodying its work, S. 2177, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., sponsored by Senator La Follette (the Chairman of the Joint Committee) was referred to a Special Committee on the Organization of the Congress in the Senate, chaired by Senator La Follette, created for the purpose of reporting the bill. See S. Res. 260, 79th Cong., 2d Sess. (1946). In the House, the Committee on Rules simply reported a rule permitting floor consideration of S. 2177, as passed in the Senate, and a substitute proposed by Representative Monroney (the Vice Chairman of the Joint Committee). See H. Res. 717, 79th Cong., 2d Sess. (1946).