Court Opinion

ID: 9487650
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:23:12.540273+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:24.957194
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I write separately only to note my disagreement with the categorical dictum that “a partial waiver ... cannot provide the basis to limit the liability of the United States under [the Federal Tort Claims Act].” Maj. Op. at 1504.
In the present case a valid regulation set out a standard of care for a function peculiar to government actors — emergency vehicular pursuit of a fleeing violator of the law. But one can easily picture a case in which the only source of a duty of care for a government function is a statute, like D.C.Code § 1-1212, waiving government immunity, but only for actions based on gross negligence. The statute in that circumstance would have to be read as accomplishing the two purposes at once: setting the standard of care at gross negligence and waiving the immunity defense for suits brought under that standard. In that case, United States liability under the FTCA would be set by reference to that standard, the only standard supplied by state law.
The cases cited by the majority to support its dictum that partial waivers of state immunity are irrelevant to determination of the standard of care under the FTCA, see Maj. Op. at 1504^05 & n. 8, from Indian Towing to Wright, Montes and Stuart, stand only for the simple proposition that state laws providing for complete immunity from suit do not affect U.S. liability under the FTCA. Unlike laws waiving immunity for activity that fails to meet a specified standard of care, such rules of total immunity cannot conceivably be read as establishing a standard of care.
Aguilar v. United States, 920 F.2d 1475, 1479 (9th Cir.1990), see Maj.Op. at 1505, strikes me as a curious intermediate case. There a state statute waived immunity but, rather than setting a special standard of care, capped the damages. The court found the cap applicable to the United States’s FTCA liability. Yet a cap seems likely to arise in large measure from a concern to protect the public fisc, i.e., the same purpose as has commonly been asserted as driving complete immunity, see 5 Fowler V. Harper et al., The Law of Torts § 29.3 (2d ed. 1985), and thus inconsistent with the impulses behind the FTCA. The special standard, by contrast, seems to embody the state’s balance of the interest in the official’s vigorous *1507pursuit of Ms activity against the competing interests that call for caution in that pursuit, i.e., a policy determination that the FTCA adopts by reference. Surely if Aguilar is correct, any standard of care specified in a state’s partial waiver should govern FTCA liability.