Whitton v. Dixon · ¶48

In that case, Air Force Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck drove home to lunch with his family in Missouri and was killed in a car crash by a negligent driver. Because the driver was a federal employee and Beck was serving in the military, the lower courts had denied Beck's widow any relief. They did so based on an atextual exception to liability of this Court's creation, which has been widely acknowledged as “difficult . . . to justify.” Id., at ––– (Sotomayor, J., statement respecting denial of certiorari); see id., at ––– – ––– (Thomas, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). Even worse, our own precedent had squarely held that this exception did not apply to a case like Beck's. See Brooks v. United States, 337 U. S. 49, 50–51 (1949). Yet, this Court, as in many similar cases, refused to even take Beck's widow's case. See, e. g., Carter v. United States, 604 U. S. ––– (2025) (Thomas, J.,…

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