Supreme Court Rules on Prat UKlal

At least, that is my reading of the decision. To cite the BLT blog:

Invoking the Federal Tort Claims Act, inmate Abdus-Shahid Ali sued the bureau for losing some of his personal belongings during a prison transfer. The government, supported by all lower courts and now the Supreme Court, said Ali's claim should be dismissed, because of an exception in the law that gives immunity from liability for "any claim arising in respect of the assessment or collection of any tax or customs duty, or the detention of any goods, merchandise or other property by any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer."

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Thomas rules that the phrase is "disjunctive, with one specific and one general category," and therefore can be read to refer to "any" law enforcement officer, not just customs officers. Thomas is joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel Alito Jr.

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Au contraire, say Kennedy and Breyer in dissent. Kennedy argues that the comma in the middle of the text at issue does not divorce the clause that follows from what went before (and therefore, the exemption only applies to customs officers.)

Read the whole post, for there is more that is interesting.

To focus again on the various interpretations, the exception in the law exception in the law that gives immunity from liability for

"any claim arising in respect of the assessment or collection of any tax or customs duty, or the detention of any goods, merchandise or other property by any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer."

Now, this was not a customs officer, but rather a prison officer, thus a law enforcement officer, who was not related in any way to assessment or collection of tax or customs duty. You have "detention of goods" by a list of three classes of people, and the final entry in that list is "any other law enforcement officer."

Thus, we have "the detention of any goods, merchandise or other property" by one of three classes, and the last class is "any other law enforcement officer."

The class " any other law enforcement officer" is a general class, and the question is how wide to expand this? Do we include only those law enforcement officers involved in customs, like the other two items on the list (any officer of customs; or excise; or any other law enforcement officer)? This is what the petitioner claims.

To cite from the actual ruling:

In petitioner’s view, “any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer” should be read as a three-item list, and the final, catchall phrase “any other law enforcement officer” should be limited to officers of the same nature as the preceding specific phrases.

To put it in halachic terms, he wishes to claim that prat uchlal (specific followed by general), ain bechlal ela ke`ein haperat (what the general class comes to include is only things similar to those listed in the specifics). That is not the halachic linguistic rule. That halachic linguistic rule is reserved for a similar construction: klal ufrat uchlal, where there is a general class followed by a specific class or classes, followed by another general class.

However, the halachic linguistic rule is not in play. The petitioner suggests that a certain rule of statutory construction, namely that of ejusdem generis, should be in play. Basically, it means ain bechlal ela ke`ein haperat, as above. Or, to cite the law dictionary:

Lat: of the same kind. A rule of statutory construction, generally accepted by both state and federal courts, "that where general words follow enumerations of particular classes or persons or things, the general words shall be construed as applicable only to persons or things of the same general nature or kind as those enumerated." 49 F. Supp. 846, 859. Thus, in a statute forbidding the concealment on one's person of "pistols, revolvers, derringers, or other dangerous weapons," the term "dangerous weapons" may be construed to comprehend only dangerous weapons of the kind enumerated, i.e., firearms, or perhaps more narrowly still, handguns.

However, Justice Thomas, together with the majority, distinguish between this classic case and the case at hand. The classic case has a list of several items (e.g. pistols, revolvers, derringers) followed by a general clause (or other dangerous weapons). That is prat ufrat ufrat uchlal. In such a case, the general clause is of a like type, and we apply ejusdem generis.

In contrast, the case at hand was just a single specific class followed by a single general class. That is, he does not read "any officer of customs or excise" as two separate classes, but rather a single class. Indeed, I would say (but haven't seen if he said this), we do not have "officer of" repeated there, as in "any officer of customs, officer of excise, or..." but rather "officer of" distributes between "customs or excise." So it is a single specific class. It is them followed by the general class, of “any other law enforcement officer.” If so, it is not prat ufrat ufrat uchlal, but rather just prat uchlal, in which case the klal includes everything.

Once again, to cite the ruling:

The phrase is disjunctive, with one specific and one general category,not—like the clauses at issue in Keffeler and Dolan—a list of specific items separated by commas and followed by a general or collective term. The absence of a list of specific items undercuts the inference embodied in ejusdem generis that Congress remained focused on the commonattribute when it used the catchall phrase.

That is indeed what happens by the halachic prat uchlal -- the klal comes to include everything.

The ruling goes on to say that even if it were to be interpreted as the general class being akin to the specific classes, it is unclear that the petitioner's proffered characteristic should be the defining one.

The petitioner also tried to advance other arguments, such as context informing the definition of "any officer."

A bit later, the ruling notes that:

Had Congress intended to limit §2680(c)’s reach as petitioner contends, it easily could have written“any other law enforcement officer acting in a customs or excise capacity.”

This would be perhaps a miut achar ribbuy? But we aren't analyzing it from that perspective here.

Justice Kennedy's dissent makes sense to me, arguing that meaning is based on context, and the statute was clearly written in terms of customs and taxes.

He notes that that the justices "Plac[e] implicit reliance upon a comma at the beginning of a clause." That seems true enough. Once again, the law in question was immunity from liability for

"any claim arising in respect of the assessment or collection of any tax or customs duty, or the detention of any goods, merchandise or other property by any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer."

That first comma is being read is divorcing "the detention of any goods, merchandise or other property" from the earlier group.

And besides this, he addresses whether ejusdem generis can apply to things other than laundry lists of items.

Note: It is quite possible I misunderstood some or all of this, as I am not a lawyer.

The blogger there noted that "Excelling at grammar has not seemed to be among the skills required of a Supreme Court justice." But my training in Jewish law makes it not seem so shocking to me that the law hinges on such grammatical constructions and analyses.