SAMANTHA SMITH, individually, ANN HERRERA, the Court Appointed Personal Administrator as administrator of the estate of Robert Steven Smith, MICAH SMITH, the Court Appointed Personal Administrator as administrator of the estate of Sydney Smith, MICAH SMITH, individually, v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
No. 20-11329
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
September 27, 2021
D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cv-04056-CC
[PUBLISH]
Plaintiffs-Appellants,
versus
Defendant-Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia
(September 27, 2021)
Before BRANCH, GRANT, and TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges.
Wanting to hold someone accountable after a tragedy is natural. Family members and estate administrators of a father and daughter who were killed when their car struck two mailboxes sued the United States over those deaths. They say that the Postal Service is liable because it failed to warn the mailboxes’ owners that the mailboxes were out of step with various safety regulations. But even assuming that they are correct—about both the regulatory infractions and the Postal Service‘s duty to provide warnings about those infractions—the United States cannot be held liable. The Federal Tort Claims Act waives sovereign immunity for the acts or omissions of a federal employee only when a private person would be liable under state tort law for those same acts or omissions. Here, because the plaintiffs have not pointed to any state-law duty, we affirm the district court‘s dismissal of their lawsuit.
I.
Just a few days after Thanksgiving in 2016, Steve Smith was driving with his 21-year-old daughter Sydney while under the influence of alcohol. Shortly after midnight, their car veered off the road and smashed into a pair of mailbox supports that belonged to two neighboring families. Tragically, both Steve and Sydney died in the collision.
The plaintiffs, members of the Smiths’ family and administrators of their estates, sued the United States, seeking damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act. They alleged that the brick, stone, and concrete mailbox supports that Steve and Sydney crashed into were in violation of U.S. Postal Service regulations as well as a host of federal guidelines, state statutes, and local ordinances. They also argued that the Postal Service‘s “failure to notify the Homeowners of the non-conforming mailbox installations constituted negligence per se” under Georgia law. The United States moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that it had sovereign immunity. The district court granted that motion, and the plaintiffs appealed.
II.
We review de novo the dismissal of a complaint for sovereign immunity. King v. U.S. Gov‘t, 878 F.3d 1265, 1267 (11th Cir. 2018). The burden of establishing that a claim falls within our jurisdiction “rests upon the party asserting jurisdiction.” Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Ins. Co. of Am., 511 U.S. 375, 377 (1994).
III.
Sovereign immunity generally protects the United States and its agencies
That is, at least not without its permission. Sovereign immunity does not bar all suits against the United States—only those filed without its consent. See, e.g., United States v. Mitchell, 463 U.S. 206, 212 (1983). The federal government can waive its sovereign immunity and has done so from time to time. See, e.g., Begner v. United States, 428 F.3d 998, 1002 (11th Cir. 2005) (stating that
Once a waiver of sovereign immunity is recognized, it still “must be strictly construed in favor of the United States” and “not enlarged beyond what the language of the statute requires.” United States v. Idaho ex rel. Dir., Idaho Dep‘t of Water Res., 508 U.S. 1, 7 (1993) (quotation omitted); see also 14 Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3654 (4th ed. 2015) (explaining that the government may dispute a suit “on the ground that the relief requested is outside the scope of the waiver“). Along those same lines, courts are required to “strictly observe” all terms and conditions that accompany a waiver of sovereign immunity. Zelaya v. United States, 781 F.3d 1315, 1322 (11th Cir. 2015). Any ambiguities are thus interpreted in one direction—in favor of immunity. See Cooper, 566 U.S. at 290.
One prominent waiver of sovereign immunity, and the one we consider here, is found in the Federal Tort Claims Act. See
It is easy to imagine why that seemed problematic for injured parties; just like many other employers, the federal government had far deeper pockets than its individual workers. And the process required to get compensation from those pockets was “notoriously clumsy.” Molzof v. United States, 502 U.S. 301, 305 (1992) (quotation omitted). Instead of filing a lawsuit against the United States, injured parties were required to petition Congress directly; Congress then sorted through the hundreds of petitions it received each year, in the end providing relief for just a small fraction of would-be plaintiffs by passing private bills. See Brownback, 141 S. Ct. at 745–46 & n.1; James E. Pfander & Neil Aggarwal, Bivens, The Judgment Bar, and the Perils of Dynamic Textualism, 8 U. St. Thomas L.J. 417, 424–25 n.39 (2011). In the face of criticism about the “speed and fairness” of this process, Congress passed the Federal Tort Claims Act, which transferred “most tort claims” from Congress to the federal courts. Brownback, 141 S. Ct. at 745–46 (quotation omitted). At least for that category of claims, Congress waived the sovereign immunity of the United States. Id..
But Congress‘s waiver was selective. The scope of the waiver in the Federal Tort Claims Act is defined by
The Act also includes another important limitation, one that turns out to be decisive here: Congress extended jurisdiction only for claims in which “the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred.”
the Federal Tort Claims Act simply allows those injured by the acts or omissions of a government employee to recover damages in the same way that they would if they were injured by the acts or omissions of a private person. See Brownback, 141 S. Ct. at 749;
To start, Georgia‘s negligence law is “well established.” Goldstein, Garber & Salama, LLC v. J.B., 300 Ga. 840, 841 (2017) (quotation omitted). A negligence claim in Georgia, as elsewhere, requires “four elements: a duty, a breach of that duty, causation and damages.” Id. (quotation omitted). Georgia law also recognizes a concept known as “negligence per se.” Simply put, if a statute establishes a duty, “violating that statute may result in a breach of the duty, constituting negligence per se.” Nash v. Reed, 825 S.E.2d 853, 857 (Ga. Ct. App. 2019); see also Goldstein, 300 Ga. at 845 (explaining that “negligence per se arises when a statute is violated” along with certain other conditions (quotation omitted)).
As we have explained, the plaintiffs’ claim depends on identifying a state-law tort, which in turn depends on establishing a state-law duty. The plaintiffs point to only one alleged Georgia tort: they say that the Postal Service was required to notify homeowners if their mailboxes did not conform to various safety standards, and that its failure to do so was negligence per se under Georgia law. The cited standards include those set in postal service regulations, a Georgia statute that prohibits the obstruction of public roads, and a local ordinance that forbids the construction of mailboxes that are a “fixed-object hazard to vehicles.” Standards Governing the Design of Curbside Mailboxes, 66 Fed. Reg. 9509, 9513 (Feb. 8, 2001);
The problem for the plaintiffs is that the duty they allege would spring only from federal guidance—the Postal Operations Manual. But as we have said, to trigger liability under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a federal employee‘s conduct must be “independently tortious under applicable state law.” Dalrymple v. United States, 460 F.3d 1318, 1327 (11th Cir. 2006). The violation of a federal manual that arguably references state law would not qualify. Even assuming that the “duty” plaintiffs seek to enforce exists, it arises only under federal law; they have not pointed us to any state or local laws that require private parties to inform homeowners when their mailbox supports fail to comply with federal, state, or local requirements. And without a state-law duty, there can be no state negligence claim for the violation of that duty. In short, because the plaintiffs have not identified a state-law duty, they have failed to plausibly allege that “the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance” with state law.
The plaintiffs’ invocation of Georgia‘s negligence per se doctrine does not save their argument. The “violation of a federal statutory duty does not automatically invoke state law principles of negligence per se.” Sellfors v. United States, 697 F.2d 1362, 1367 (11th Cir. 1983); see also, e.g., Johnson v. Sawyer, 47 F.3d 716, 728–29 (5th Cir. 1995) (en banc). And really,
The sovereign immunity of the United States thus “remains intact” for the claims brought in this lawsuit and “no subject matter jurisdiction exists.” Bennett v. United States, 102 F.3d 486, 488 n.1 (11th Cir. 1996); see also Brownback, 141 S. Ct. at 749. Without subject matter jurisdiction, “the court must dismiss the action.”
* * *
Because a private person would not be liable under state law for the allegedly tortious conduct identified by the plaintiffs, the Federal Tort Claims Act‘s waiver of sovereign immunity does not apply. We thus AFFIRM the dismissal of the plaintiffs’ claims.