For individuals there are things like police having qualified Immunity as individuals. So you can’t sue the police agency because of soverign immunity and the officer because of qualified immunity.
There are some limitations, but the bar is extremely high. Like you can sue an officer, but there has to be a massive mountain of evidence that their actions were not ‘doing their job’. There is no real chance of suing a SWAT team member for example, because they most likely have a warrant and expect violence to happen.
Government safety agencies shutting down businesses, newly formed potholes damaging cars, etc. are the common scenarios where the immunity makes some kind of sense because otherwise it would overwhelm the courts if every government action or lack of action could end up in court.
The bar is too high for a lot of those things though.
The federal government of the United States has sovereign immunity and may not be sued anywhere in the United States unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit. The United States has waived sovereign immunity to a limited extent, mainly through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives the immunity if a tortious act of a federal employee causes damage, and the Tucker Act, which waives the immunity over claims arising out of contracts to which the federal government is a party.[55] As a sovereign, the United States is immune from suit unless it unequivocally consents to being sued.[56] The United States Supreme Court in Price v. United States and Osage Indians observed: “It is an axiom of our jurisprudence. The government is not liable to suit unless it consents thereto, and its liability in suit cannot be extended beyond the plain language of the statute authorizing it.”[57]
So Democrats could still waive sovereign immunity in the future?
Well, hypothetically, I expect so.
Are there any limits to the amount of money on class action lawsuits?
So, I don’t think that there are limits to class action suits as such, but in…I think the 1990s or so, can’t recall the exact timeframe, there was a wave of tort reform, and a lot of states placed limits on punitive damages on lawsuits in general as some kind of multiple of compensatory damages. I don’t know if federal torts have such limits or if so, what they are off-the-cuff.
searches
It sounds like there is such a limit on punitive damages in case law implied by the US Constitution according to BMW of North America, Inc v. Gore, but I don’t think that it’s spelled out precisely what that limit is.
I mean, if you suffer $1 in damages and then try to sue for $1 in compensatory damage and $1 trillion in punitive damages, I’d imagine that it’d probably run afoul of that.
Actually…I’m not totally sure whether punitive damages can be applied to the government at all. I mean, the idea behind them is to deter and the idea is that elections are supposed to do that if the party involved is the government.
Punitive damages are penalties intended solely to punish an employer and deter future intentional misconduct. While generally available in private sector Title VII claims where the employer acted with malice or reckless indifference, the law explicitly prohibits their award against the federal government, or any state or local government entity. This prohibition is rooted in the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which protects the government from being sued for money damages unless Congress has clearly waived that immunity.
When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which authorized compensatory and punitive damages, it included a specific exception. The statute states that punitive damages cannot be recovered against a government agency or political subdivision. Therefore, a federal employee cannot receive punitive damages in an EEOC administrative claim or a subsequent civil lawsuit against the federal agency. The focus of recovery against a federal agency remains on restoring the employee to the position they would have occupied without the discrimination.
So I’d guess probably punitive damages are available in the general case of the US waiving sovereign immunity, because otherwise the CRA wouldn’t have had that exception prohibiting punitive damages present. So I suppose probably one can go for punitive damages, as long as there isn’t some similar exception restricting punitive damages in whatever waiver on whatever you’re thinking of suing over.
EDIT: Honestly, though, if you think that the Trump administration has caused some general harm and you’re hoping that the Democrats explicitly want to pay for it, my bet, without knowing the specifics of what you’re concerned about, is that a more-likely outcome would be the Democrats explicitly budgeting funds for it, not arranging to send it to court with the idea of losing a lawsuit and then being ordered to pay out funds.
Yeah, if they wanted to do so, in theory they could. However, even if that were the case, it’d be unlikely to happen until 2029. The President has a veto on legislation, and Congress requires a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative houses to override that veto on a given piece of legislation.
Congress can play hardball with the budget, refuse to fund the Executive, but outside of that, generally, there’s a strong bias towards the status quo in the US system of government: lots of ability to block other entities from changing from the status quo.
IIRC, despite wildly-conflicting statements on the matter to different audiences, Trump hasn’t been particularly opposed to skilled immigration, so maybe he might not veto an increase there.
If you’re thinking about, like, the high-school-diploma-only green card lottery being greatly expanded to crank up unskilled legal immigration, it’s theoretically possible, but I would bet against it happening for political and economic reasons. For unskilled labor, illegal immigration is probably more-advantageous to to the US than legal immigration; you can get labor, and thus economic production for the country, without needing to pay out a variety of government benefits that one otherwise would need to pay out. Milton Friedman (Nobel-prize winning economist, was involved with designing the income tax system in the US) has some old video where he’s giving a talk at some university and was happily saying something like “immigration is only good because it’s illegal”. I mean, he’s intentionally being provoking there for the effect, but he’s got a point.
Like, the people who are gonna get citizenship are gonna be the kids of illegal immigrants born in the US, not the illegal immigrants themselves. Those kids are gonna go through the education system and ideally acquire a skillset there.
In practice, would probably be better to do all this legally, have some kind of unskilled work visa that doesn’t provide benefits, but I can’t imagine that there’s any way that a “two-tiered citizenship” would stand muster politically.
What are the limits of sovereign immunity?
It’s basically a protection against certain lawsuits.
Does it protect all members of government from lawsuits?
That would be separate thing called qualified immunity. It protects the employee from personal liability when they are on the job.
For individuals there are things like police having qualified Immunity as individuals. So you can’t sue the police agency because of soverign immunity and the officer because of qualified immunity.
There are some limitations, but the bar is extremely high. Like you can sue an officer, but there has to be a massive mountain of evidence that their actions were not ‘doing their job’. There is no real chance of suing a SWAT team member for example, because they most likely have a warrant and expect violence to happen.
Government safety agencies shutting down businesses, newly formed potholes damaging cars, etc. are the common scenarios where the immunity makes some kind of sense because otherwise it would overwhelm the courts if every government action or lack of action could end up in court.
The bar is too high for a lot of those things though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity
So Democrats could still waive sovereign immunity in the future? Are there any limits to the amount of money on class action lawsuits?
Well, hypothetically, I expect so.
So, I don’t think that there are limits to class action suits as such, but in…I think the 1990s or so, can’t recall the exact timeframe, there was a wave of tort reform, and a lot of states placed limits on punitive damages on lawsuits in general as some kind of multiple of compensatory damages. I don’t know if federal torts have such limits or if so, what they are off-the-cuff.
searches
It sounds like there is such a limit on punitive damages in case law implied by the US Constitution according to BMW of North America, Inc v. Gore, but I don’t think that it’s spelled out precisely what that limit is.
I mean, if you suffer $1 in damages and then try to sue for $1 in compensatory damage and $1 trillion in punitive damages, I’d imagine that it’d probably run afoul of that.
Actually…I’m not totally sure whether punitive damages can be applied to the government at all. I mean, the idea behind them is to deter and the idea is that elections are supposed to do that if the party involved is the government.
goes looking
https://legalclarity.org/are-eeoc-punitive-damages-available-against-the-federal-government/
So I’d guess probably punitive damages are available in the general case of the US waiving sovereign immunity, because otherwise the CRA wouldn’t have had that exception prohibiting punitive damages present. So I suppose probably one can go for punitive damages, as long as there isn’t some similar exception restricting punitive damages in whatever waiver on whatever you’re thinking of suing over.
EDIT: Honestly, though, if you think that the Trump administration has caused some general harm and you’re hoping that the Democrats explicitly want to pay for it, my bet, without knowing the specifics of what you’re concerned about, is that a more-likely outcome would be the Democrats explicitly budgeting funds for it, not arranging to send it to court with the idea of losing a lawsuit and then being ordered to pay out funds.
Congress could increase the immigration quota. Maybe they should double or triple the immigration quota.
Yeah, if they wanted to do so, in theory they could. However, even if that were the case, it’d be unlikely to happen until 2029. The President has a veto on legislation, and Congress requires a two-thirds supermajority in both legislative houses to override that veto on a given piece of legislation.
Congress can play hardball with the budget, refuse to fund the Executive, but outside of that, generally, there’s a strong bias towards the status quo in the US system of government: lots of ability to block other entities from changing from the status quo.
IIRC, despite wildly-conflicting statements on the matter to different audiences, Trump hasn’t been particularly opposed to skilled immigration, so maybe he might not veto an increase there.
If you’re thinking about, like, the high-school-diploma-only green card lottery being greatly expanded to crank up unskilled legal immigration, it’s theoretically possible, but I would bet against it happening for political and economic reasons. For unskilled labor, illegal immigration is probably more-advantageous to to the US than legal immigration; you can get labor, and thus economic production for the country, without needing to pay out a variety of government benefits that one otherwise would need to pay out. Milton Friedman (Nobel-prize winning economist, was involved with designing the income tax system in the US) has some old video where he’s giving a talk at some university and was happily saying something like “immigration is only good because it’s illegal”. I mean, he’s intentionally being provoking there for the effect, but he’s got a point.
goes looking for said video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfU9Fqah-f4
Like, the people who are gonna get citizenship are gonna be the kids of illegal immigrants born in the US, not the illegal immigrants themselves. Those kids are gonna go through the education system and ideally acquire a skillset there.
In practice, would probably be better to do all this legally, have some kind of unskilled work visa that doesn’t provide benefits, but I can’t imagine that there’s any way that a “two-tiered citizenship” would stand muster politically.