Sovereign immunity is the idea that the government and its officials are protected from being sued and from having to pay for damages. This concept has been around for a long time and is still important today. In Florida, it includes the freedom from being sued and the freedom from having to pay for damages. Over the past 50 years, there have been changes to the rules about when and how sovereign immunity cases can be appealed. The Florida Supreme Court made a big decision in 2020 that made sovereign immunity even stronger. This affects how cases involving the government are handled in court. Before 1975, the government had nearly complete protection from being sued, so there was very little opportunity for appeals. The Florida Constitution gives the legislature the power to change this, and in 1975, they allowed certain types of lawsuits against the government. However, there were limitations on the types of cases that could be brought. This created a need for the appeals court to clarify the law. Before 1994, there was no process for the government to appeal a decision denying their immunity. The rules for government immunity were similar to those for workers’ compensation, and they both saw significant changes in the mid-1990s. In 1992, the Florida Supreme Court changed the rules to allow immediate appeals of certain legal orders. This included orders that said a party didn’t have workers’ compensation immunity as a matter of law. These orders became appealable, which means they could be reviewed by a higher court. Later, the rules were clarified to say that the legal reason for the order had to be clearly stated on the order itself. In 1994, the rules were changed again to allow for immediate appeals of orders denying qualified immunity, which protects government officials from being sued. These changes were made to help government officials avoid costly and distracting lawsuits. However, the changes were narrow and didn’t apply to all types of immunity claims. Two years after the Tucker case, the Florida Supreme Court was asked to decide if the court should allow immediate appeal of orders denying entitlement to sovereign immunity in the Department of Education v. Roe case. In Roe, the defendants claimed sovereign immunity when their motions to dismiss were denied, but the court rejected their requests to broaden the rule. Sixteen years later, in Keck v. Eminisor, the court was asked if government employees should be given certiorari relief in simple tort suits, and they expanded the scope of the rule to include suits against individuals in their governmental employee capacity. The case of Keck involved a lawsuit against a trolley driver who worked for the Jacksonville Transit Authority, after the trolley hit a pedestrian. The driver claimed he couldn’t be sued because he was a government employee and had immunity from lawsuits. The Supreme Court decided that individual government employees can appeal a court’s decision about their immunity, if it’s a question of law. This changed the rules for when government employees can appeal lawsuits against them. In the case of Jackson v. Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Supreme Court made a big change to how appeals for sovereign immunity cases are handled. They eliminated a lot of restrictions on when government defendants can challenge orders related to their sovereign immunity defense. This means that these cases can now be decided much earlier in the legal process, which is a big deal for anyone who has had to go through a whole trial because they couldn’t appeal earlier. Overall, it’s a major change that gives more importance to the protection of government entities from lawsuits.
Source: https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/the-evolution-of-rule-9-130-and-appellate-review-of-sovereign-immunity/
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