A pilot with HIV who sued the U.S. government under the Privacy Act of 1974 for damages he allegedly had sustained as the result of information-sharing between the Social Security Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration with respect to his medical condition was not entitled to monetary compensation for mental and emotional harm, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-3 opinion released today (Justice Kagan took no part in the proceedings). Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion.
Justice Sotomayor, writing for the dissenters, cautioned that “notably absent from the Privacy Act is any provision so much as hinting that ‘actual damages’ should be limited to economic loss.” Adopting a reading of “actual damages” that permits recovery for pecuniary loss alone creates a disconnect between the Act’s substantive and remedial provisions and allows a swath of governmental violations to go unremedied, Sotomayor said, asserting that reading “actual damages” to permit recovery for any injury established by competent evidence in the record—pecuniary or not—best effectuates the statute’s basic purpose of redressing and deterring violations of privacy interests. The Court should not, as a self-constituted guardian of the Treasury import immunity back into a statute designed to limit it, she maintained. Fed. Aviation Admin. v. Cooper (USSCt) March 28, 2012