Tort Law

Sovereign immunity protects the government from liability arising in suits brought against it by citizens. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) broadly waives sovereign immunity for tort claims against the United States. The discretionary function exception maintains immunity for tortious acts committed by employees acting within the valid bounds of their discretion. There is a circuit split about whether the discretionary function exception immunizes tortious conduct that is also unconstitutional.
This Comment argues that the discretionary function exception should only immunize unconstitutional tortious conduct when the actions do not violate clearly established constitutional rights of which a reasonable officer would have known.

The 2023 Supreme Court case Twitter v. Taamneh found that defendant social media companies were not liable for aiding and abetting a terrorist attack overseas. The Court alluded to the existence of an alternative set of facts that might alter their analysis or produce a different outcome. This Comment explores those “other contexts” and seeks to identify what factors could produce a successful Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) aiding and abetting claim against a social media company for an act of terrorism overseas. Ultimately, this Comment concludes that it would take an extraordinary set of facts to find social media companies secondarily liable for an act of terrorism. This Comment then suggests other avenues to encourage social media companies to heighten their detection of Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) activity and prevent future attacks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare inherent tensions between the protection of intellectual property (IP) and the health of individuals touched by life-threatening medical conditions. Instead of looking for solutions that would entail legislative action, a stretch of emergency powers, or vague private commitments, we suggest that the law already provides a mechanism for addressing this tension in the form of the age-old common tort law doctrine of necessity.