Hencely v. Fluor Corp.

Majority reasoning

The majority held that federal preemption — the legal rule that federal law overrides conflicting state law — requires an actual conflict between state law and either the Constitution or a valid federal statute, and no such conflict exists here. The Court reasoned that the Federal Tort Claims Act's "combatant activities" exception, which shields the federal government itself from certain war-related lawsuits, does not extend to private contractors and cannot be used to block suits against them. The majority relied on its earlier decision in Boyle v. United Technologies Corp., which only protects a contractor from state-law liability when the government directed the contractor to do the very thing being challenged — not when the contractor acted contrary to government instructions. Because the Army's own investigation found Fluor violated its contractual duties to supervise the bomber, there was no conflict between state negligence law and federal policy; in fact, both pointed in the same direction. The Court also rejected the argument that the Constitution's war powers implicitly bar all war-related tort suits, noting that courts have allowed such suits since the nation's earliest years and that Congress — not courts — is the proper body to grant contractors blanket immunity if that is the policy choice.

Dissent reasoning

The dissent argued that the Constitution assigns the power to make war exclusively to the federal government — Congress declares war and raises armies, the President commands the armed forces, and the States are expressly barred from engaging in war — and that this exclusive federal domain means state tort law cannot intrude on combat-related decisions, even without an express preemption statute. Justice Alito wrote that allowing this lawsuit to proceed would force military commanders to submit to depositions, expose sensitive national security documents to discovery, and potentially have a jury second-guess the military's deliberate strategic decision to employ Afghan nationals at Bagram Airfield as part of the "Afghan First" policy. The dissent further argued that Boyle does not govern this case because it addressed a different federal interest — procurement contracts — while the interest here is the federal government's exclusive authority over foreign affairs and wartime strategy. The dissent also raised the concern that South Carolina's choice-of-law rules could require the case to be tried under Afghan law as it existed in 2016, which would be extraordinarily difficult to ascertain and would represent an even greater intrusion into an exclusively federal domain.