Court Opinion

ID: 9486143
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:38:57.939207+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:32.721191
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The court’s decision today creates an unacceptable level of ambiguity in the law of the circuit with respect to cases under the Illinois Structural Work Act. It also creates an intolerable ambiguity with respect to the application of the Structural Work Act in cases brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
The prior decisions in Savic v. United States, 918 F.2d 696 (7th Cir.1990), and Lulich v. Sherwin-Williams Co., 992 F.2d 719 (7th Cir.1993), cannot live in analytical peace. The court follows Lulich but leaves Savic in place, while disparaging it as “mechanical.” If there is any principled and practical difference between Lulich and Savic, it lies not in the different procedural postures of the two cases, but in the fact that Savic involved a federal governmental contractual relationship. This case, like Savic, but unlike Lu-lich, involves this unique relationship of the *1278United States government to its contractors. My colleagues apparently do not believe this similarity to be a matter of much consequence.1
I respectfully submit that this case ought to be set for argument before the entire court. The analytical tension between Lvr lich and Savic must be resolved before it creates needless work for our colleagues in the district courts of the circuit. If the unique relationship of the government to its contractors justifies a different approach than the one usually employed in other Structural Work Act cases, that issue should also be decided in a manner that will provide sufficient guidance to both the courts and the litigants of the circuit.
I would set this case for hearing en banc.

. The Federal Tort Claims Act requires, as the majority points out, that the “United States shall be liable ... in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances.” 28 U.S.C. § 2674 (1988). Consequently, the federal government will be liable to the same extent as a private contractor that exercises the requisite degree of control over the job site. However, in determining whether that requisite degree of control exists, the differences in the relationships formed by governmental and nongovernmental contracts must be taken into account. I respectfully suggest that, if the two precedents before us can be distinguished, this basis is a more principled one than the one offered by the majority.