In 2017, FBI agents executed a no-knock warrant at the home of Curtrina Martin, deploying a flashbang grenade and sending a SWAT team in full tactical gear into her family’s home in the middle of the night. But the agents raided the wrong house—their actual target was a nearby home on a different street, with a different house number, and with distinguishable features. The FTCA expressly authorizes suits against the government for harms caused by federal actors and imposes tort liability in accordance with the law of the state where the actions took place. When Martin and her family sued the United States under the FTCA, the district court dismissed the family’s case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed that decision. Relying on prior Eleventh Circuit precedent, that court held that FTCA claims are barred by the Supremacy Clause when a federal employee’s actions “have some nexus with furthering federal policy” and “can reasonably be characterized as complying with the full range of federal law.” This is because, according to the court, enforcing the FTCA and its incorporated state law would “impede or burden the execution of federal law.” Martin asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, and the Court agreed. 

In March 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court in support of Martin explaining why the Eleventh Circuit’s judge-made exception to the FTCA is at odds with the text and history of the Supremacy Clause, as well as Supreme Court precedent.  

First, the Supremacy Clause assigns courts a critical—but limited—role of reviewing conflicts between state and federal law. The Supremacy Clause provides in relevant part that “[t]his Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land; . . . any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” The Framers chose to assign the task of enforcing the Supremacy Clause to the judiciary, in line with its established role as “expositor[] of the Laws,” while leaving the law-making powers to Congress. Under the Supremacy Clause, the role of the courts, therefore, is to ensure that acts of Congress take precedence over conflicting state laws, not to rewrite federal statutes under the guise of ensuring federal supremacy.  

Second, the FTCA is a sweeping and unambiguous waiver of sovereign immunity. It provides that “[t]he United States shall be liable . . . in the same manner and to the same extent as a private individual under like circumstances.” In defining the scope of this waiver, Congress was careful to balance competing interests and included several express statutory exceptions limiting liability—none of which are for acts that “have some nexus with furthering federal policy” and “can be reasonably characterized as complying with the full range of federal law.” There is simply no room for courts to write new exceptions into the text of the Act. Wrong under any circumstances, this act of judicial legislation is especially troublesome in the context of a decision about whether to waive sovereign immunity. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized, waiving sovereign immunity is uniquely within the purview of Congress and it is not for the courts to narrow those waivers beyond what the text provides.  

Third, the FTCA is a federal law, so application of its text, as written by Congress, cannot possibly run afoul of the Supremacy Clause. The fact that Congress chose to incorporate state law as the source of substantive liability in the FTCA does not change that fact because the incorporation of state law as the source of substantive liability does not dispossess the FTCA of its status as “the supreme Law of the Land.” 

The Supreme Court should reverse the judgment of the Eleventh Circuit.