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The False Claims Act (FCA), also called the "Lincoln Law", is an American federal law that imposes liability on persons and companies who defraud governmental programs. It is the federal Government's primary litigation tool in combating fraud against the Government. The law includes a qui tam provision that allows people who are not affiliated with the government, called "relators" under the law, to file actions on behalf of the government. Persons filing under the Act stand to receive a portion of any recovered damages. As of 2019, over 71 percent of all FCA actions were initiated by whistleblowers. Claims under the law have typically involved health care, military, or other government spending programs, and dominate the list of largest pharmaceutical settlements. The government has recovered more $62 billion under the False Claims Act between 1987 and 2019.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering and allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, closing a perceived loophole that allowed a person who instructed someone else to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because they did not actually commit the crime personally.
In law, standing or locus standi is the term for the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party's participation in the case. Standing exists from one of three causes:
- The party is directly subject to an adverse effect by the statute or action in question, and the harm suffered will continue unless the court grants relief in the form of damages or a finding that the law either does not apply to the party or that the law is void or can be nullified. This is called the "something to lose" doctrine, in which the party has standing because they will be directly harmed by the conditions for which they are asking the court for relief.
- The party is not directly harmed by the conditions by which they are petitioning the court for relief but asks for it because the harm involved has some reasonable relation to their situation, and the continued existence of the harm may affect others who might not be able to ask a court for relief. In the United States, this is the grounds for asking for a law to be struck down as violating the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, because while the plaintiff might not be directly affected, the law might so adversely affect others that one might never know what was not done or created by those who fear they would become subject to the law – the so-called "chilling effects" doctrine.
- The party is granted automatic standing by act of law. Under some environmental laws in the United States, a party may sue someone causing pollution to certain waterways without a federal permit, even if the party suing is not harmed by the pollution being generated. The law allows them to receive attorney's fees if they substantially prevail in the action. In some U.S. states, a person who believes a book, film or other work of art is obscene may sue in their own name to have the work banned directly without having to ask a District Attorney to do so.
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest organization based in the United States dedicated to litigating environmental issues. It is headquartered in San Francisco and has 14 regional offices across the United States, an International Program, a communications team, and a Policy & Legislation team in Washington, DC.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), enacted in 1976, is the principal federal law in the United States governing the disposal of solid waste and hazardous waste.
In common law, a writ of qui tam is a writ through which private individuals who assist a prosecution can receive for themselves all or part of the damages or financial penalties recovered by the government as a result of the prosecution. Its name is an abbreviation of the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning "[he] who sues in this matter for the king as well as for himself."
Ex parte Young, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), is a United States Supreme Court case that allows suits in federal courts for injunctions against officials acting on behalf of states of the union to proceed despite the State's sovereign immunity, when the State acted contrary to any federal law or contrary to the constitution.
The Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Force Act of 1871, Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, or Third Ku Klux Klan Act, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacy organizations. The act was passed by the 42nd United States Congress and signed into law by United States President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871. The act was the last of three Enforcement Acts passed by the United States Congress from 1870 to 1871 during the Reconstruction Era to combat attacks upon the suffrage rights of African Americans. The statute has been subject to only minor changes since then, but has been the subject of voluminous interpretation by courts.
United States environmental law concerns legal standards to protect human health and improve the natural environment of the United States. While subject to criticism at home and abroad on issues of protection, enforcement, and over-regulation, the country remains an important source of environmental legal expertise and experience.
Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706 (1999), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States about whether the United States Congress may use its Article One powers to abrogate a state's sovereign immunity from suits in its own courts, thereby allowing citizens to sue a state in state court without the state's consent.
Treble damages, in United States law, is a term that indicates that a statute permits a court to triple the amount of the actual/compensatory damages to be awarded to a prevailing plaintiff. Treble damages are a multiple of, and not an addition to, actual damages in some instances. On occasion, however, as in CAL. CIV. CODE § 1719, they are additive. When such damages are multiplicative and a person received an award of $100 for an injury, a court applying treble damages would raise the award to $300. Some statutes mandate awards of treble damages for all violations. Examples of statutes with mandatory treble damages provisions are the Clayton Antitrust Act and RICO. Some statutes allow for an award of treble damages only if there is a showing that the violation was willful. For example, "up to three times the amount found or assessed" may be awarded by a court in the United States for willful patent infringement. The idea behind the creation of such damages is that they will encourage citizens to sue for violations that are harmful to society in general, and deter the violator from committing future violations.
The United States Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) is one of seven litigating components of the U.S. Department of Justice. ENRD's mandate is to enforce civil and criminal environmental laws and programs protecting the health and environment of the United States, and to defend suits challenging those laws and programs.
The United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida is the United States Attorney responsible for representing the federal government in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Title 40 is a part of the United States Code of Federal Regulations. Title 40 arranges mainly environmental regulations that were promulgated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), based on the provisions of United States laws. Parts of the regulation may be updated annually on July 1.
The Tulane Environmental Law Clinic (TELC) is a legal clinic that Tulane Law School has operated since 1989 to offer law students the practical experience of representing real clients in actual legal proceedings under state and federal environmental laws.
United States v. Weitzenhoff, 35 F.3d 1275 is a legal opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that addresses the confusing mens rea requirement of a federal environmental law that imposed criminal sanctions on certain polluters. The main significance of the court's opinion was that it interpreted the word "knowingly" in the statute to mean a general awareness of the wrongfulness of one's actions or the likelihood of illegality, rather than an actual knowledge of the statute being violated. Circuit Court Judge Betty Binns Fletcher authored the majority's legal opinion in this case.
In United States law, the federal government as well as state and tribal governments generally enjoy sovereign immunity, also known as governmental immunity, from lawsuits. Local governments in most jurisdictions enjoy immunity from some forms of suit, particularly in tort. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act provides foreign governments, including state-owned companies, with a related form of immunity—state immunity—that shields them from lawsuits except in relation to certain actions relating to commercial activity in the United States. The principle of sovereign immunity in US law was inherited from the English common law legal maxim rex non potest peccare, meaning "the king can do no wrong." In some situations, sovereign immunity may be waived by law.
The Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) is the law enforcement arm of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is made up of attorneys, special agents, scientists and other employees.
In the United States, a private attorney general is an informal term for a private attorney who brings a lawsuit considered to be in the public interest, i.e., benefiting the general public and not just the plaintiff, on behalf of a citizen or group of citizens. The attorney may, at the equitable discretion of the court, be entitled to recover attorney's fees if he or she prevails. The rationale behind this principle is to provide extra incentive to private attorneys to pursue suits that may be of benefit to society at large.
There are benefits to leaving environmental regulation both to the federal government to the states. Proponents of federal environmental policy argue that it is necessary to set equal standards for all states in order to level the playing field. Furthermore, it is much easier for large corporations to abide by one universal policy rather than having to deal with a variety of standards for their locations in different states. On the other hand, state regulations are thought to be more adaptable and quicker to get passed than federal legislation. The geographical and population characteristics of any two states are likely to be very different. For example, wildlife conservation is much more of a concern for Alaska than for New York. New York, however, has much bigger air and light pollution issues than Alaska.
References
- ↑ See, e.g., Citizen Suits: The Teeth in Public Participation, 25 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. L. Inst.) 10141 (Mar. 1995), http://www.tulane.edu/~telc/assets/articles/Citz%20Suits%20Teeth-ELR_95.pdf Archived 2010-06-01 at the Wayback Machine ; Jeffrey G. Miller & Environmental Law Inst., Citizen Suits: Private Enforcement of Federal Pollution Control Laws (1987).
- ↑ See, e.g., Citizen Suits "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-01-15. Retrieved 2009-11-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- ↑ See Middlesex City Board of Chosen Freeholders v. New Jersey, 645 F. Supp. 715, 721-22(D.N.J. 1986); see also RCRA Imminent Hazard Authority: A Powerful Tool for Businesses, Governments, and Citizen Enforcers, 24 Envtl. L. Rep. (Envtl. L. Inst.) 10122 (March 1994), http://www.tulane.edu/~telc/assets/articles/RCRA%20Haz%20ELR_94.pdf Archived 2010-06-01 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ See Adam Babich, The Wages of Sin: The Violator-Pays Rule for Environmental Citizen Suits, 10 Widener L. Rev. 219 (2003); see also The Violator-Pays Rule, Envtl. F., May/June 2004, at 30, http://www.tulane.edu/~telc/assets/articles/2004%20Forum%20Violator%20Pays.pdf%5B%5D.
- ↑ See Zygmunt J.B. Plater, Facing a Time of Counter-Revolution—The Kepone Incident and a Review of First Principles, 29 U. RICH. L. REV. 657, 701 (1995) (Environmental citizen suit provisions were “[m]odelled after provisions in the civil rights acts . . . .”)
- ↑ See Earthjustice web page, http://earthjustice.org/our_work/cases/index.html; Tulane Environmental Law Clinic web page, http://www.tulane.edu/~telc/assets/pdfs/lawsuits.pdf
- ↑ Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992).