Loose Lips Launch Ships: Stewart v. Dutra Construction Company, Inc.

Throughout American maritime history, seamen have been viewed in a special light and both Congress and the judiciary have evidenced great solicitude for their welfare. In 1920, the special attention to the plight of the seaman culminated in generous remedies being provided via the Merchant Marine Act, commonly known as the Jones Act. Under the Act, any "seaman" injured during the course of employment may bring a negligence claim against the employer with a right to jury trial. When Congress enacted the legislation it did so without defining the statutory term “seaman.” Not surprisingly, determining which maritime workers should qualify as Jones Act seamen has proved to be a daunting task due in no small part to the "myriad of circumstances" in which maritime employees go upon the water. During the 1990s, the Supreme Court came down with three key decisions in an effort to clarify the test for seaman status under the Jones Act. Integrating the holdings of these cases, the seaman status test consists of two prongs: (1) an employment related connection that "contributes to the function...or the accomplishment of [the] mission" of a vessel or fleet of vessels in navigation and (2) the employment related connection to the vessel in navigation must be "substantial in terms of both its duration and its nature." As demonstrated by this test, the lynchpin for both prongs of the seaman status test is a vessel that is "in navigation." When the Court granted certiorari in Stewart v. Dutra Construction Company, it appeared that the Supreme Court was going to finally alleviate this confusion and supply the final pieces of the seaman status conundrum. In Stewart, writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Thomas concluded that 1 U.S.C. § 316 ("section 3") not only provided the proper standard to determine whether a craft was a vessel under the Longshore Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (the "LHWCA"), but also for the "vessel in navigation" requirement of the two-prong Jones Act seaman status test. Despite achieving uniformity or exemplifying generosity, the validity of the holding in Stewart is questionable. After providing some necessary historical background in Part I, Part II discusses Stewart’s reasoning, which constitutes the foundation of the opinion is not only convoluted, but overly simplistic and arguably flawed. Part III of this essay will first focus on the legitimacy of the logic employed by Justice Thomas in Stewart which culminated in the Court's endorsement of the broad language of section 3. Part IV then addresses the ramifications of the Court’s evisceration of the vessel "in navigation" element of the seaman status test in terms of the decision's effect on the advances made by the Court in clarifying this area of the law via its Jones Act decisions of the 1990s. The position will be maintained in Part V that the "wayward case law" of Stewart succeeded in removing the one criterion, the "in navigation" requirement, which would have validated the pre-Stewart two-prong test for seaman status. Finally, Part VI concludes the article and will focus on the basic maritime principles and policies which should have been considered if the goal of the Court had been to devise a test for seaman status that comported with the congressional intent and purpose underlying both the Jones Act and the LHWCA.