United States v. Kwai Fun Wong
The Supreme Court ruled that the strict filing deadlines in the Federal Tort Claims Act can be paused, or "equitably tolled," when a person suing the government has a good excuse for missing them.
The decision means the deadlines are ordinary time limits rather than absolute jurisdictional barriers, giving courts room to forgive late filings by people with valid excuses in lawsuits against federal agencies.
“The time limits in the FTCA are just time limits, nothing more.”
The Court's bottom-line holding that the deadlines are ordinary, not jurisdictional.
How it got here: Trial courts dismissed both claims as untimely and jurisdictional; the Ninth Circuit reversed both, and the government asked the Supreme Court to review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Kwai Fun Wong claimed the immigration service falsely imprisoned her and missed a filing deadline while a court was slow to let her add the claim to an existing lawsuit. Marlene June sued over a highway median barrier that killed a young man's father, missing her deadline because she said the government hid facts about the barrier's safety testing. Both women asked courts to excuse their late filings.
The question before the Court
If someone misses a deadline for suing the government over an injury, can a court still excuse the delay for a good reason?
The Court's answer
Yes -- the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Tort Claims Act's filing deadlines can be paused when someone has a good excuse for missing them. The Court explained that Congress must clearly say a deadline strips courts of their power to hear a case before courts will treat it that way, and nothing in this law's wording or structure said that.
The government argued the deadline should be absolute because it borrowed similar wording from an older law about money claims against the government, and because it was a condition on the government's agreement to allow lawsuits at all. The Court rejected both arguments, noting that identical wording had already been read to allow flexibility in other laws, and that a similar condition-of-suit argument had already failed in an earlier case involving a different anti-discrimination law.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
People injured by federal government actions -- from wrongful imprisonment to unsafe federal highway approvals -- now have a chance to argue their late claims should still be heard if they can show a good reason for the delay, rather than being automatically thrown out no matter the circumstances.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts. For June, the trial court must now decide, on the specific facts of her case, whether she deserves the benefit of a paused deadline because the government allegedly concealed key facts. This is a final decision on the legal question of whether tolling is available at all, not a temporary order.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Wong or June actually deserve to have their deadlines excused -- only that courts have the power to consider excusing them. The lower courts, on remand, still must weigh the specific facts of each woman's excuse.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito argued the deadlines should be treated as absolute jurisdictional bars because Congress borrowed the exact 'shall be forever barred' wording from an older law governing money claims against the government, which courts had treated as jurisdictional for over a century. He argued that even if not jurisdictional, the deadline's absolute wording still should block any late filings, and that the majority wrongly relied on a general tolling presumption instead of examining what Congress actually intended when it wrote this specific law.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied a rule from an earlier case setting a presumption that time limits on suits against the government can be paused for a good reason, unless Congress clearly says the deadline strips courts of their power to hear the case at all.
- Under that framework, a filing deadline only strips a court of power if Congress gives a 'clear statement' saying so; ordinary, mandatory, or emphatically worded deadlines are not enough by themselves.
- The Court examined the wording of the Tort Claims Act's deadline and found it only describes when a claim is too late, without ever mentioning the courts' power to hear cases -- unlike statutes that plainly tie a deadline to a court's authority.
- The Court noted that the law's grant of court authority appears in a separate section from the deadline itself, and that separation is a signal that lawmakers did not mean to link the two.
- The Court rejected the government's argument that identical wording in an older law about money claims against the government meant the same wording here must strip courts of power, explaining that this phrase was common wording of that era used in both tolling-friendly and tolling-unfriendly statutes.
- The Court also rejected the argument that any deadline attached to the government's agreement to be sued must be treated as an absolute bar, because an earlier case had already excused deadlines in a different sue-the-government law under similar conditions.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Irwin v. Department of Veterans Affairs (498 U. S. 89)
The Court relies on Irwin's rule that suits against the government presumptively allow excusing missed deadlines.
Distinguishes John R. Sand & Gravel Co. v. United States (552 U. S. 130)
The Court says that case's jurisdictional ruling rested only on decades of prior rulings, not on the wording at issue here.