Lets say I die as a result of a regulation that Scott Pruitt “rolls back” can my heirs sue him (or the Fed. Gov. with any reasonable chance of success?
I doubt it. Many causes of death that might be related to something like that are very hard to actually prove. For example, even though we know that certain things significantly increase a person’s risk of cancer, most cancers have more than one possible cause.
What if property values plummet because a toxic waste dump is permitted to open?
(Yeah…no. Suing the government for not regulating something is gonna be massively difficult.)
You would probably have to sue the company who caused you to die. It would be, IANAL, a tort, which is a civil wrong not involving a breach of contract. But “the government should have made this illegal” is a tough sell in court.
Regards,
Shodan
The type of claim that the OP is talking about is generally prohibited by sovereign immunity, and the Federal Tort Claims Act not does waive immunity for this type of stuff.
To back up, governments are generally immune to lawsuits, except where governments have agreee to waive its immunity. Governments generally maintain their immunity for policy making purposes, so you can’t sue the USG for failing to launch a war to kill bin Laden before 9/11, or for not enacting a good enough health care law to prevent you from going bankrupt due to an illness, etc.
The legal maxim is something along the lines of “the government is free to cure society’s ills in the time, sequence, and manner it so chooses.”
If one can show that the executive has failed to follow the law as written one has an opening to pursue. But it’s an uphill climb. One of the many obstacles is that in general the executive of the government is under-resourced and cannot in fact implement and enforce with 100% reliability 100% of the laws and regs on the books.
So given that there must, as a matter of economic physics, be some picking and choosing and overlooking and just plain not being in the right place at the right time to see a violation, when does that rise to an actionable level? The answer, by and large, is that it can’t absent some pretty major malfeasance. At which point the remedy arises mostly in the political arena.
It wasn’t a lawsuit that ultimately forced actual changes in the water in Flint, Michigan. It was the political hue and cry.