Defending Government Tort Litigation: Considerations for Scholars
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Paul Figley
Abstract
I am honored by the invitation to participate in this symposium on “What Practitioners Can Teach Academics About Tort Litigation” and to share my views from the defense side of government tort litigation. I have a foot in each camp of the practitioner/academic divide. For three decades I defended the federal government in Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) litigation, serving for the last 15 of those years as Deputy Director of the FTCA Staff in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. I worked with the FTCA and its jurisprudence on a daily basis—litigating cases, assessing and negotiating proposed settlements, advising agencies and Assistant U.S. Attorneys, and commenting on proposed legislation. I left Justice in 2006 to become an academic, a role in which I have had the pleasure of teaching Torts to first year law students and the time and freedom to write about sovereign immunity, the FTCA, and other things.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Shannon Roddy, Victoria Kazmierczak, and Rachel Bruce for their research assistance.
© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- Defending Government Tort Litigation: Considerations for Scholars
- What Practitioners can Teach Academics About Tort Litigation – The Plaintiff’s Perspective in Medical Malpractice Litigation
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- AALS Torts Panel
- “…A Damn Shame”: James Davey’s Thoughtful Cynicism
- By Insurers, For Insurers: The UK’s Liability Regime for Autonomous Vehicles
- Not So Fast: A Brief Plea for Muddling Through the Problems of Autonomous Vehicle Liability
- Essay
- Ordinary Tort Litigation in China: Law versus Practical Justice?
- Symposium, “What Practitioners Can Teach Academics about Tort Litigation”
- Expert Testimony Needs Judges to Act as “Gatekeepers”: The Maryland Court of Appeals Teaches Why
- Shifting the Burden of Proof on Causation: The One Who Creates Uncertainty Should Bear Its Burden
- Defending Government Tort Litigation: Considerations for Scholars
- What Practitioners can Teach Academics About Tort Litigation – The Plaintiff’s Perspective in Medical Malpractice Litigation
- Litigation Financing: Balancing Access with Fairness
- Products Liability Law – Lessons from the Military and Industrial Contexts
- What Practitioners can Teach Academics about Tort Litigation: Auto Accidents from the Plaintiff’s Counsel
- Fighting the Good Fight: The Insurance Defense Litigator
