120
Syllabus
FCA was passed in 1863, the County argues that municipal corporations were not so understood until six years later, when the Court decided Cowles v. Mercer County, 7 Wall. 118. Cowles, however, was not an extension of principle but a natural recognition of the common understanding that municipal corporations and private ones were to be treated alike in terms of their legal status as persons capable of suing and being sued. This explains how the Court in Cowles could conclude "automatically and without discussion" that municipal corporations, like private ones, "should be treated as natural persons for virtually all purposes of constitutional and statutory analysis." Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Servs., 436 U. S. 658, 687-688. Of course, the meaning of "person" recognized in Cowles was only a presumptive one, but neither the history nor the text of the original FCA provides contextual evidence that Congress intended to exclude municipalities from the class of "persons" covered by the FCA in 1863. Pp. 125-129.
(b) The False Claims Amendments Act of 1986 did not repeal municipal liability. As part of an effort to modernize the FCA, the 1986 amendments raised the ceiling on damages recoverable under § 3729(a) from double to treble. Relying on the common law presumption against punitive damages for municipalities, see Newport v. Fact Concerts, Inc., 453 U. S. 247, 259-260, and n. 21, and on this Court's statement in Stevens, supra, at 784, 785, that the change from double to treble damages turned what had been a "remedial" provision into an "essentially punitive" one, the County argues that, even if municipalities were covered by the term "person" from 1863 to 1986, Congress's adoption of a "punitive" remedy entailed the elimination of municipal liability in 1986. It does not follow from Stevens, however, that the punitive feature of FCA damages has the force to show congressional intent to repeal implicitly the existing definition of "person." To begin with, the FCA's damages multiplier has a compensatory function as well as a punitive one. Most obviously, the statute's qui tam feature means that as much as 30 percent of the Government's recovery may go to a private relator who began the action. Even when there is no qui tam relator to be paid, liability beyond actual damages may be necessary for full recovery, since the FCA has no separate provision for prejudgment interest or consequential damages. The force of the treble damages remedy's "punitive" nature in arguing against municipal liability is not as robust as it would be if that remedy were a pure penalty in all cases. What is more, treble damages certainly does not equate with classic punitive damages, which leaves the jury with open-ended discretion over the amount, and so raises two concerns specific to municipal defendants: that local govern-ment's taxing power will make it an easy target for an unduly generous
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007