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U.S. Supreme Court Cites Restatement of Judgments

U.S. Supreme Court Cites Restatement of Judgments

The U.S. Supreme Court recently cited the Restatement of the Law, Judgments, in Brownback v. King, No. 19-546 (Feb. 25, 2021), which concluded that a dismissal of claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) against the United States was a substantive ruling on the merits that can trigger a provision of the FTCA known as the judgment bar and preclude separate claims against individual government employees whose conduct gave rise to the dismissed FTCA claims. 

The FTCA, 28 U.S.C. § 1346, allows plaintiffs to bring some state-law claims against the United States for torts committed by federal employees acting within the scope of their employment, but the provision known as the judgment bar, § 2676, provides that “[t]he judgment in an action under section 1346(b)” precludes a plaintiff from bringing a lawsuit involving the same subject matter against a government employee whose act or omission gave rise to the claim. 

This case arose from a violent encounter between members of a federal task force and the respondent, whom the task-force members had mistaken for a fugitive. The respondent brought an action under the FTCA against the United States, alleging that the task-force members committed torts under Michigan law. He also sued the task-force members individually under the cause of action recognized by Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971). The district court dismissed the respondent’s FTCA claims, finding that the United States was immune because the federal government retained the benefit of state-law immunities available to its employees, and the officers would have been entitled to state qualified immunity had Michigan claims been brought against them. The district court ruled in the alternative that the respondent’s FTCA claims failed to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) because the officers used reasonable force, had probable cause to detain him, and acted within their authority. The court dismissed the respondent’s Bivens claims against the officers, finding that the officers were entitled to federal qualified immunity. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed, holding that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity. The Sixth Circuit reasoned that the district court’s dismissal of the respondent’s FTCA claims did not trigger the judgment bar and preclude the respondent’s Bivens claims, because the dismissal was based on lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and did not reach the merits of the FTCA claims. 

Reversing the decision of the Sixth Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the district court’s “order was a judgment on the merits of the FTCA claims that can trigger the judgment bar.” Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the Court, noted that the judgment bar “was drafted against the backdrop doctrine of res judicata,” and “[t]o ‘trigge[r] the doctrine of res judicata or claim preclusion’ a judgment must be ‘on the merits.’” The Court determined that the district court’s ruling “passed directly on the substance of [the respondent’s] FTCA claims” because the issue of whether all the elements of the respondent’s FTCA claims were established by undisputed facts was “a quintessential merits decision.” Quoting Restatement of the Law, Judgments § 49, Comment a, the Court concluded that the district court’s alternative Rule 12(b)(6) ruling was also a judgment on the merits because, ‘“[i]f the judgment determines that the plaintiff has no cause of action’ based ‘on rules of substantive law,’ then ‘it is on the merits.’” 

The Court clarified that “an on-the-merits judgment can still trigger the judgment bar, even if that determination necessarily deprives the court of subject-matter jurisdiction.” The Court reasoned that, in the unique context of the FTCA, a plaintiff had to plausibly allege all elements of his or her FTCA claims in order to survive a merits determination and to provide the district court with subject-matter jurisdiction. While a court usually could not rule on the merits when it had no jurisdiction, “where, as here, pleading a claim and pleading jurisdiction entirely overlap, a ruling that the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction may simultaneously be a judgment on the merits that triggers the judgment bar.” The Court cited Restatement of the Law, Judgments § 49, Comments a and b, in explaining that a “dismissal for lack of jurisdiction is a still a ‘judgment’” and that “judgments were preclusive with respect to issues decided as long as the court had the power to decide the issue.” The Court concluded that, because “a federal court always has jurisdiction to determine its own jurisdiction,” “a federal court can decide an element of an FTCA claim on the merits if that element is also jurisdictional.” 

Read the full opinion here.