Federal Tort Claims Act

Traditionally, the federal government was immune from lawsuits by its citizens under a doctrine known as sovereign immunity. Theoretically, this immunity was justified because people would necessarily have disagreements with the government and resorting to the court system to help resolve those disputes could have resulted in a tremendous waste of time and energy. However, the situation left people with no solution when they were harmed by a person acting for the government, even if the action had nothing or little to do with the government's sovereignty. For example, under strict sovereign immunity, a person is unable to recover harms for routine torts such as slip-and-falls. Perhaps even more worrisome was the fact that, under strict sovereign immunity, people were unable to recover for intentional harms and torts inflicted by the government or government agencies, even when those harms violated federal laws. The Federal Tort Claims...
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