Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/468

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310

MOLZOF v. UNITED STATES Opinion of the Court

hospitalized. Otherwise, these duplicative damages would be “punitive damages” because they have the effect of making the United States pay twice. The difficulties inherent in attempting to prove such offsets would be enormous. That the Government has refused to acknowledge the practical implications of its theory is evidenced by its representations at oral argument that, as a general matter, it is willing to accept state-law definitions of compensatory awards for purposes of the FTCA, Tr. of Oral Arg. 28, and that “there are very few circumstances” in which States have authorized damages awards that the Government would challenge as punitive, id., at 38. The Government’s reading of the statute also would create problems in liquidated damages cases and in other contexts in which certain kinds of injuries are compensated at fixed levels that may or may not correspond to a particular plaintiff ’s actual loss. At oral argument, however, the Government disclaimed that extension of its theory, see id., at 28, 35, and instead asserted that its position was that state compensatory awards are recoverable under the Act so long as they are a “reasonable” approximation of the plaintiff ’s actual damages, id., at 36. We agree that § 2674 surely does not prohibit any compensatory award that departs from the actual damages in a particular case. But the Government’s restrictive reading of the statute would involve the federal courts in the impractical business of determining the actual loss suffered in each case and whether the damages awarded are a “reasonable” approximation of that loss. Finally, we reject the Government’s reliance on this Court’s interpretations of various statutory exceptions to FTCA liability contained in § 2680, some of which depart from traditional common-law concepts, as supportive of the notion that we should adopt a definition of “punitive damages” that departs from the common law. Many of the § 2680 exceptions simply have no obvious common-law antecedent. For example, § 2680(a) provides that the United