When the defendant is a government, the value of a case is decided long before anyone counts the medical bills or the lost profits. Sovereign immunity means there is no recovery at all unless the plaintiff can point to a statute in which the government has agreed to be sued, and each of those consent statutes carries its own forum, its own ceiling, and its own catalog of damages it refuses to pay. This guide walks the major doors one at a time: the Federal Tort Claims Act for ordinary negligence, the Tucker Act and the Court of Federal Claims for money the government owes, Section 1983 and Bivens for constitutional violations, the Takings Clause for property the government appropriates, the Administrative Procedure Act (which delivers an order, not a check), and the fee-shifting statutes that are frequently the only money that changes hands. It explains why punitive damages and prejudgment interest are so often unavailable, why juries disappear when you sue the sovereign, and why the tidy "average award" statistics readers expect simply do not exist in any honest public dataset. The goal is a working method for valuing a case against a public defendant with clear eyes.