Opinion in Orff v. United States
on Jun 23, 2005 at 3:11 pm
In today’s unanimous opinion in Orff v. United States, the Court held that farmers in California could not sue the federal government in a water dispute because Congress had not waived the government’s sovereign immunity to such suits. The case involves a 1963 contract between the United States Bureau of Reclamation, which operates a series of federal water projects in California, and the Westlands Water District, an entity that, in turn, sells water to farmers in California’s Central Valley. In the 1990s, the Bureau cut in half the amount of water it was delivering to the Water District in response to new federal statutes requiring the Bureau to protect endangered fish in the waterways administered by the Bureau. The Water District, in turn, had substantially less water to provide to the farmers. The Water District and the farmers sued the Bureau for breach of the 1963 contract, but the Bureau eventually settled with the Water District, leaving only the farmers’ claims.
In today’s decision, the Court held that the federal government’s sovereign immunity barred the farmer’s claims. The Court observed that it has long held that agencies of the United States may not be sued without the Government’s consent. In this case, Congress waived that immunity to an extent in 43 U.S.C. 390uu. That provision states that “[c]onsent is given to join the United States as a necessary party defendant in any suit to ajudicate . . . the contractual rights of a contracting entity and the United States” under a Bureau of Reclamation water contract. The farmers argued that their suit fell within this provision because they were third party beneficiaries of the contract between the Water District and the Bureau.
Justice Thomas, writing for the Court, disagreed. Invoking the rule that waivers of sovereign immunity must be narrowly construed, the Court concluded that Section 390uu consented only to suits in which the Government was joined as a necessary party in this sense contemplated by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19 and did not extend to direct suits against the Government by a private party. Thus, the statute would permit joinder of the United States in a suit between a farmer and a water district if the case implicated the Bureau’s interests, but it does not permit a farmer to sue the Bureau directly.
Accordingly, the Court was not required to decide whether the farmers were, in fact, third party beneficiaries to the water contracts (and therefore entitled to enforce its terms) because even if the farmers had otherwise enforceable rights under the contract, those rights could not be enforced through a direct suit against the Bureau.
