G.L. Christian and Associates v. United States is a 1963 United States Federal Acquisition Regulationcourt case which has become known as the Christian Doctrine. The case held that standard clauses established by regulations may be considered as being in every Federal contract. Because the FAR is the law, and government contractors are presumed to be familiar with the FAR, a mandatory clause that expresses a significant or deeply ingrained strand of public procurement policy will be incorporated into a Government contract by operation of law, even if the parties intentionally omitted it.
Case background
The Army Corps of Engineers signed a contract with G.L. Christian and Associates to build 2,000 housing units for soldiers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, under the "Capehart Act". Fort Polk was deactivated by the Department of the Army in 1958, and the $32.9 million construction contract was terminated by the Corps of Engineers on February 5, 1958. The contractor responded to the cancellation by submitting claims for costs incurred, settlement expenses, and lost profits. The Dept. of the Army attempted to settle these claims in accordance with the standard “termination for convenience of the government” clause outlined in the Armed Services Procurement Regulations. Under this clause, the contractor could claim a profit allowance for work it already had performed, but not for anticipated profits. However, the company argued that because the Army had failed to include this termination for convenience clause in the contract, the Army's cancellation of the project constituted a breach of contract. The contractor claimed that it thus was entitled to common-law damages for breach, including anticipated profits. An "unusual feature of the case" is that G.L. Christian and Associates were not negatively affected financially in any way by the termination of the Fort Polk contract. G.L. Christian and Associates attempted to assign the entire contract to Zachry and Centex, two "highly competent construction companies with extensive experience in large scale-enterprises" but the Department of the Army took the position that a housing contract under the Capehart Act could not be assigned to another company. At a later conference though, it was agreed that the contract would be transferred to Zachry and Centex with a subcontract by G.L. Christian and Associates. Zachry and Centex became the "de facto prime contractor". After the deactivation, Zachry and Centex sued in the name of G.L. Christian and Associates because they had no privity of contract with the Federal Government, and it could not sue the government in its own name.
Legal expansion
Two years after the filing of G.L. Christian, the U.S. Court of Claims held that this doctrine by the G.L. Christian company could be applied for the benefit of a claimant, as well as for the U.S. Government. This court ruled that an appeal was timely when filed within 60 days after a hearing examiner's decision, as required by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission regulations, despite the fact that the contract contained a clause providing that an appeal should be taken within 30 days. In 1969, the doctrine of G.L. Christian was expanded. In General Services Administration v. Benson, 415 F.2d 878, Benson was in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over property that he had purchased from the General Services Administration. Benson filed suit to make the G.S.A. produce various documents needed to present his tax case. The court forbade the G.S.A. from withholding the records, citing a G.S.A. regulation requiring disclosure of records in the absence of a "compelling reason" for non-disclosure. In contrast, Kunzi in his book Army Law downplays the early expansion of the doctrine of Christian, "Although Christian was cited in over 100 court and board decisions between 1963 and 1976, in only one of these decisions did an adjudicator incorporate a mandatory contract clause into a contract. In every other decision, the court or board either found that the doctrine of Christian did not mandate incorporation, or resolved the dispute. without addressing the incorporation issue...Until the late 1970s, the doctrine of Christian was considered to be a conceptually intriguing, but practically unattainable, tool...The seed that the Christian court planted in 1963 took almost fifteen years to germinate, but once the seed took root, it flourished. Beginning in the early 1980s, the boards of contract appeals began to apply the doctrine of Christian with increasing frequency."
Legal contraction
In 1993, a U.S. District Court of Appeal modified the doctrine of Christian, holding that it only "applies to mandatory contract clauses which express a significant or deeply-ingrained strand of public procurement policy."
Criticism
In the court case S.J. Amoroso Construction Co. v. U.S., 26 Cl. Ct. 759, Judge Plager wrote an opinion suggesting that the court had used the Christian Doctrine to resolve a case that could have been resolved more satisfactorily using other legal principles. He argued for very limited use of the Christian Doctrine based on the following reasons: The Nash & Cibinic Report after reporting on several early 1990 Christian Doctrine cases wrote:
