Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 552 U.S. 214 (2008), was a United States Supreme Court case, upholding the United States's sovereign immunity against tort claims brought when "any law enforcement officer" loses a person's property.

His personal property, packed into two duffel bags, was shipped separately.

The case turned on the grammar of part of the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a 1946 law that waives sovereign immunity in some cases so that the federal government may be sued for certain torts.

The FTCA states that the waiver of immunity does not apply to claims arising from the detention of property by "any officer of customs or excise or any other law enforcement officer."

In his dissent, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that the majority was using "wooden reliance" on the single word any without considering the rest of the paragraph of the FTCA, and added, "If Congress had intended to give sweeping immunity to all federal law enforcement officials from liability for the detention of property, it would not have dropped this phrase onto the end of the statutory clause so as to appear there as something of an afterthought."