The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Wednesday to allow a disabled veteran’s lawsuit against a major military contractor to proceed, rejecting the company’s claim that it was immune from state-law suits in a war zone.
Justice Clarence Thomas authored the majority opinion, joined by the Court’s three liberals—Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—as well as Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch. The ruling reverses a lower court’s decision that had previously blocked the case.
The case centers on the 2016 Veterans’ Day attack at Bagram Airfield, then the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan.
According to the court’s opinion, then-Army Specialist Winston Tyler Hencely was permanently disabled when he confronted Ahmad Nayeb, a Taliban operative working for the military contractor Fluor Corporation.
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As Hencely questioned him, Nayeb detonated a suicide vest. The explosion killed five people and wounded 17. Military investigators later determined that Hencely’s intervention likely prevented a much larger massacre, but they also pointed the finger at Fluor. An Army report found that the contractor’s “unreasonable complacency” and failure to supervise Nayeb allowed him to obtain the tools needed to build the bomb and walk undetected through the base.
When Hencely sued Fluor under state law for negligent supervision, the company argued that federal law preempted the case because the incident occurred during wartime combatant activities.
Justice Thomas firmly rejected that logic, noting that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals had incorrectly found “Hencely’s claims preempted even though the conduct complained of was neither ordered nor authorized by the Federal Government.”
“No provision of the Constitution and no federal statute justifies that preemption of the State’s ordinary authority over tort suits,” Thomas wrote. “Nor does any precedent of this Court command such a result.”
The majority emphasized that while the federal government itself has sovereign immunity, private contractors do not automatically share that shield—especially when they are accused of violating the very instructions the military gave them.
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Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a sharp dissent. Alito argued that allowing state juries to second-guess security arrangements in an active war zone is an unconstitutional intrusion into federal power.
“The Constitution divides authority between the Federal Government and the States in many areas, but not when it comes to war,” Alito wrote. “War is the exclusive domain of the Federal Government, but the Court allows state (or foreign law) to encroach on that domain. The Constitution precludes that encroachment, and therefore petitioner’s suit is preempted.”
The Supreme Court’s decision sends the case back to the lower courts, where Hencely can finally argue the merits of his negligence claims. The ruling establishes that defense contractors can be held liable under state law for conduct that the military did not specifically order or authorize.
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