2024 Term of Court
The federal government claims “sovereign immunity” from lawsuits for damages, but Congress has enacted several statutes that implicitly waive that immunity. Two of the statutes explicitly allow lawsuits for damages against the government’s law enforcement officers, for assaults, batteries, false imprisonments, false arrests, abuses of process, and malicious prosecutions, each of which are “torts” as recognized by the laws of most states. See 28 U.S.C. §2680(h) and §1346(b). A lower federal court, however, had recently refused to follow those statutes, on the ground they violated “The “Supremacy Clause” of the United States Constitution. See U.S. Const., Art. VI, 2d sentence. In Martin v. United States (US SupCt Slip Opinion of June 12, 2025), the Court unanimously ruled that
- The Supremacy Clause had no application to the facts of this case; and
- A federal statutory exception to the two cited statutes, effectively preserving sovereign immunity for another kind of governmental action, might have an application to the facts of this case, but one which should first be analyzed by the lower federal courts.
Comment: This case was more about Supreme Court practice than any applicable law. The Court basically reaffirmed its usual practice of allowing lower federal courts to analyze new legal issues within its jurisdiction before the Court undertakes to do so. The Court unanimously agreed that the Constitutional Supremacy Clause rationale offered to avoid the application of a federal statute was patently absurd, and could never be followed again in any federal court. Otherwise, the Court unanimously recognized, and gave official sanction to its “percolation” practice of abstaining from decisions on new legal issues, in order to allow lower courts to address them first. The practice is not a legal restriction, but a practical one required by the extremely high volume of petitions the Court receives annually, far beyond its capacity to rule on most of them.
Dan D. Rhea
RECENT RULINGS 