Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/490/122
Timestamp: 2013-12-12 04:54:10
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Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1502', '§ 104', '§ 213', '§ 221', '§ 1372', '§ 221']

Elisa CHAN, et al., Petitioners v. KOREAN AIR LINES, LTD. | Supreme Court | LII / Legal Information Institute
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490 U.S. 122 (109 S.Ct. 1676, 104 L.Ed.2d 113)
[HTML] Syllabus This case involves wrongful death actions against Korean Air Lines, Ltd. (KAL), by survivors of persons killed when one of its planes was destroyed by a Soviet aircraft. All parties agree that their rights are governed by the multilateral treaty known as the Warsaw Convention, which provides a per passenger damages limitation for personal injury or death. A private accord among airlines known as the Montreal Agreement requires carriers to give notice of this limitation to passengers in print size no smaller than 10-point type. Since KAL's notice to passengers on the flight in question appeared in only 8-point type, plaintiffs moved for a partial summary judgment declaring that the discrepancy deprived KAL of the benefit of the damages limitation. The District Court denied the motion, finding that neither the Convention nor the Agreement prescribes elimination of the limitation as the sanction for failure to provide the required form of notice. The Court of Appeals affirmed on interlocutory appeal.
Held: International air carriers do not lose the benefit of the Warsaw Convention's damages limitation if they fail to provide notice of that limitation in passenger tickets. The Montreal Agreement concededly does not impose such a sanction, and the Convention's plain language also does not direct that result. Interpreting the second sentence of Article 3(2) of the Convention which subjects a carrier to unlimited liability only for the nondelivery of a passenger ticketto apply to the failure to provide an "adequate" statement of notice of the damages limitation conflicts with the language of the first sentence of Article 3(2), which specifies that "the . . . irregularity . . . of the . . . ticket shall not affect the existence or the validity of the transportation contract." Such an interpretation of the text would also entail the unlikely result that even a minor defect in a ticket, totally unrelated to adequate notice, would eliminate the liability limitation. That defective compliance with the notice provision does not void the damages limitation is confirmed by comparing Article 3(2) with other Convention provisions, which specifically impose that sanction for failure to include the notice of liability limitation in baggage checks and air waybills for cargo. Although the Convention's drafting history might be consulted to elucidate a text that is ambiguous, this Court has no power to insert an amendment into a treaty where the text is clear. Pp. 125-135.
* On September 1, 1983, over the Sea of Japan, a military aircraft of the Soviet Union destroyed a Korean Air Lines, Ltd. (KAL), Boeing 747 en route from Kennedy Airport in New York to Seoul, South Korea. All 269 persons on board the plane perished. Survivors of the victims filed wrongful-death actions against KAL in several Federal District Courts, all of which were transferred for pretrial proceedings to the District Court for the District of Columbia pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1407. All parties agree that their rights are governed by the Warsaw Convention, a multilateral treaty governing the international carriage of passengers, baggage, and cargo by air. Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules Relating to International Transportation by Air, Oct. 12, 1929, 49 Stat. 3000, T.S. No. 876 (1934), reprinted in note following 49 U.S.C.App. § 1502.
On July 25, 1985, the District Court for the District of Columbia denied the motion, finding that neither the Warsaw Convention nor the Montreal Agreement prescribes that the sanction for failure to provide the required form of notice is the elimination of the damages limitation. In re Korean Air Lines Disaster of September 1, 1983, 664 F.Supp. 1463. Its opinion specifically considered and rejected contrary Second Circuit precedent. See In re Air Crash Disaster at Warsaw, Poland, on March 14, 1980, 705 F.2d 85, cert. denied sub nom. Polskie Linie Lotnicze v. Robles, 464 U.S. 845, 104 S.Ct. 147, 78 L.Ed.2d 138 (1983). On September 24, 1985, the District Court certified for interlocutory appeal under 28 U.S.C. 1292(b) (1982 ed., Supp. IV) the question whether KAL "is entitled to avail itself of the limitation of damages provided by the Warsaw Convention and Montreal Agreement despite its defective tickets." The District of Columbia Circuit allowed the appeal and (following a remand of the record for clarification of the scope of the District Court's order) affirmed, adopting the District Court's opinion in full. In re Korean Air Lines Disaster of September 1, 1983, 265 U.S.App.D.C. 39, 829 F.2d 1171 (1987). We granted certiorari, 485 U.S. 986, 108 S.Ct. 1288, 99 L.Ed.2d 499 (1988), to resolve the conflict among the Courts of Appeals. (In addition to the Second Circuit, the Fifth is in disagreement with the District of Columbia Circuit's resolution here. See In re Air Crash Disaster Near New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 9, 1982, 789 F.2d 1092 (1986), reinstated, 821 F.2d 1147 (1987) (en banc).)
They argue, however, that such a requirement is created by reading the Montreal Agreement in conjunction with the Warsaw Convention. This argument proceeds in two steps. First, petitioners assert that Article 3 of the Warsaw Convention removes the protection of limited liability if a carrier fails to provide adequate notice of the Convention's liability limitation in its passenger tickets. Second, they contend that the Montreal Agreement's 10-point type requirement supplies the standard of adequate notice under Article 3. Because we reject the first point, we need not reach the second.
Although Article 3(1)(e) specifies that a passenger ticket shall contain "a statement that the transportation is subject to the rules relating to liability established by this convention," nothing in Article 3 or elsewhere in the Convention imposes a sanction for failure to provide an "adequate" statement. The only sanction in Article 3 appears in the second clause of Article 3(2), which subjects a carrier to unlimited liability if it "accepts a passenger without a passenger ticket having been delivered." Several courts have equated nondelivery of a ticket, for purposes of this provision, with the delivery of a ticket in a form that fails to provide adequate notice of the Warsaw limitation. See In re Air Crash Disaster Near New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 9, 1982, supra; In re Air Crash Disaster at Warsaw, Poland, on March 14, 1980, 705 F.2d 85 (CA2), cert. denied sub nom. Polskie Linie Lotnicze v. Robles, 464 U.S. 845, 104 S.Ct. 147, 78 L.Ed.2d 138 (1983); Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft v. CAB, 156 U.S.App.D.C. 191, 196-197, 479 F.2d 912, 917-918 (1973); Lisi v. Alitalia-Linee Aeree Italiane, S.p.A., 370 F.2d 508 (CA2 1966), aff'd by equally divided Court, 390 U.S. 455, 88 S.Ct. 1193, 20 L.Ed.2d 27 (1968); Egan v. Kollsman Instrument Corp., 21 N.Y.2d 160, 287 N.Y.S.2d 14, 234 N.E.2d 199 (1967), cert. denied, 390 U.S. 1039, 88 S.Ct. 1636, 20 L.Ed.2d 301 (1968). See also Warren v. Flying Tiger Line, Inc., 352 F.2d 494 (CA9 1965) (conditioning liability limitation upon delivery of tickets in such manner as to afford passengers a reasonable opportunity to take measures to protect against liability limitation); Mertens v. Flying Tiger Line, Inc., 341 F.2d 851 (CA2) (same), cert. denied, 382 U.S. 816, 86 S.Ct. 38, 15 L.Ed.2d 64 (1965). But see Ludecke v. Canadian Pacific Airlines, Ltd., 98 D.L.R.3d 52, 57 (Can.1979) (rejecting the view of the American cases).
We cannot accept this interpretation. All that the second sentence of Article 3(2) requires in order to avoid its sanction is the "delivery" of "a passenger ticket." Expanding this to mean "a passenger ticket in compliance with the requirements of this Convention" is rendered implausible by the first sentence of Article 3(2), which specifies that "the . . . irregularity . . . of the passenger ticket shall not affect the existence or the validity of the contract of transportation, which shall none the less be subject to the rules of this convention." It is clear from this (1) that an "irregularity" does not prevent a document from being a "passenger ticket"; and (2) that an "irregularity" in a passenger ticket does not eliminate the contractual damages limitation provided for by the Convention. "Irregularity" means the "quality or state of not conforming to rule or law," Webster's Second International Dictionary (1950), and in the present context the word must surely refer to the rules established by the Convention, including the notice requirement. Thus, a delivered document does not fail to qualify as a "p ssenger ticket," and does not cause forfeiture of the damages limitation, merely because it contains a defective notice. When Article 3(2), after making this much clear, continues (in the second sentence) "Nevertheless, if a carrier accepts a passenger without a passenger ticket having been delivered, etc.," it can only be referring to the carrier's failure to deliver any document whatever, or its delivery of a document whose shortcomings are so extensive that it cannot reasonably be described as a "ticket" (for example, a mistakenly delivered blank form, with no data filled in). Quite obviously, the use of 8-point type instead of 10-point type for the liability limitation notice is not a shortcoming of such magnitude; indeed, one might well select that as a polar example of what could not possibly prevent a document from being a ticket.
The conclusion that defective compliance with the notice provision does not eliminate the liability limitation is confirmed by comparing Article 3(2) with other provisions of the Convention. Article 3 is a part of Chapter II of the Convention, entitled "Transportation Documents." Just as Section I of that Chapter (which includes Article 3) specifies what information must be included in passenger tickets, Sections II and III specify what information must be included in, respectively, baggage checks and air waybills for cargo. All three sections require, in identical terms, "a statement that the transportation is subject to the rules relating to liability established by this convention." Articles 3(1)(e), 4(3)(h), 8(q). All three sections also provide, again in identical terms, that if the relevant document (ticket, baggage check, or air waybill) has not been delivered (or, in the case of air waybill, "made out"), the carrier "shall not be entitled to avail himself of the provisions of this convention which exclude or limit his liability." Articles 3(2), 4(4), and 9. But, unlike Section I, Sections II and III also specifically impose the latter sanction for failure to include in the documents certain particulars, including (though not limited to) the notice of liability limitation.
Sections II and III thus make doubly clear what the text of Article 3(2) already indicates: that delivery of a defective document is something quite different from failure to deliver a document. And given the parallel structures of these provisions it would be a flouting of the text to imply in Section I a sanction not only withheld there but explicitly granted elsewhere. When such an interpretation is allowed, the art of draftsmanship will have become obsolete.
Petitioners and the United States as amicus curiae seek to explain the variance between Section I and Sections II and III (as well as the clear text of Article 3) as a drafting error, and lead us through the labyrinth of the Convention's drafting history in an effort to establish this point. It would be absurd, they urge, for defective notice to eliminate liability limits on baggage and air freight but not on personal injury and death. Perhaps not. It might have been thought, by the representatives from diverse countries who drafted the Convention in 1925 and 1929 (an era when even many States of this country had relatively low limits on wrongful-death recovery) that the $8,300 maximum liability established for personal injury or death was a "fair" recovery in any event, so that even if the defective notice caused the passenger to forgo the purchase of additional insurance, he or his heirs would be treated with rough equity in any event. Cf. C. McCormick, Law of Damages § 104 (1935) ("In about one-third of the states, a fixed limit upon the recovery under the Death Act is imposed in the statute. The usual limit is $10,000, but in some instanc § the maximum is $7,500 or $5,000"). Quite obviously, however, the limitation of liability for baggage and freight (about $16.50 per kilogram, see Article 22(2)) was not set with an eye to fair value (the very notion of a "fair" average value of goods per kilogram is absurd), but perhaps with an eye to fair level of liability in relation to profit on the carriageso that the shipper of lost goods misled by the inadequate notice would not be compensated equitably. Another possible explanation for the difference in treatment is that the limitations on liability prescribed for baggage and freight are much more substantial and thus notice of them is much more important. They include not just a virtually nominal monetary limit, but also total exclusion of liability for "an error in piloting, in the handling of the aircraft, or in navigation." Article 20. Or perhaps the difference in treatment can be traced to a belief that people were much more likely, if adequate notice was given, to purchase additional insurance on goods than on their own livesnot only because baggage and freight are lost a lot more frequently than passengers, but also because the Convention itself establishes, in effect, an insurance-purchasing counter at the airport for baggage and freight, providing that if the consignor makes "a special declaration of the value at delivery and has paid a supplementary sum if the case so requires," the carrier will be liable for actual value up to the declared sum. Article 22(2); see also Articles 4(g), 8(m).
These estimations of what the drafters might have had in mind are of course speculation, but they suffice to establish that the result the text produces is not necessarily absurd, and hence cannot be dismissed as an obvious drafting error. We must thus be governed by the textsolemnly adopted by the governments of many separate nationswhatever conclusions might be drawn from the intricate drafting history that petitioners and the United States have brought to our attention. The latter may of course be consulted to elucidate a text that is ambiguous, see, e.g., Air France v. Saks, 470 U.S. 392, 105 S.Ct. 1338, 84 L.Ed.2d 289 (1985). But where the text is clear, as it is here, we have no power to insert an amendment.
As Justice Story wrote for the Court more than a century and a half ago: "To alter, amend, or add to any treaty, by inserting any clause, whether small or great, important or trivial, would be on our part an usurpation of power, and not an exercise of judicial functions. It would be to make, and not to construe a treaty. Neither can this Court supply a casus omissus in a treaty, any more than in a law. We are to find out the intention of the parties by just rules of interpretation applied to the subject matter; and having found that, our duty is to follow it as far as it goes, and to stop where that stopswhatever may be the imperfections or difficulties which it leaves behind." The Amiable Isabella, 6 Wheat. 1, 71, 5 L.Ed. 191 (1821).
The Court holds that the sanction of Article 3(2), which consists of the loss of the Convention's limitation on liability under Article 22(1), applies only when no passenger ticket at all is delivered. That is a plausible reading, perhaps even the most plausible reading of the language of the Convention. But it is disingenuous to say that it is the only possible reading. Certainly it is wrong to disregard the wealth of evidence to be found in the Convention's drafting history on the intent of the governments that drafted the document. It is altogether proper that we consider such extrinsic evidence of the treatymakers' intent. See Air France v. Saks, 470 U.S. 392, 396, 400, 105 S.Ct. 1338, 1340, 1342, 84 L.Ed.2d 289 (1985); Societe Nationale Industrielle Aerospatiale v. United States District Court, 482 U.S. 522, 534, 107 S.Ct. 2542, 2550, 96 L.Ed.2d 461 (1987); Volkswagenwerk Aktiengesellschaft v. Schlunk, 486 U.S. 694, 700-702, 108 S.Ct. 2104, 2108-2109, 100 L.Ed.2d 722 (1988). The drafters of an international treaty generally are, of course, the instructed representatives of the governments that ultimately ratify the treaty. The record of their negotiations can provide helpful clues to those governments' collective intent, as it took shape during the negotiating process.
There is strong evidence that the drafters of the Warsaw Convention may have meant something other than what the Court thinks that document says. In the first place, the text of the Convention is surely susceptible of an interpretation other than the Court's. Article 3(1) describes as follows what it is the carrier must deliver: "A passenger ticket which shall contain the following particulars. . . ." I think it not at all unreasonable to read the term "passenger ticket," when used subsequently in Article 3(2), as shorthand for this longer phrase. The first sentence of Article 3(2), moreover, quite clearly does not have the meaning the Court ascribes to it. Ante, at 128. That sentence provides that the "absence, irregularity, or loss" of a ticket shall not affect the validity of the contract, "which shall none the less be subject to the rules of this convention." Those rules include the one laid down in the very next sentence, i.e., the provision for loss of the liability limitation. Thus, there exists a contract even if the ticket is absent or "irregular," and that contract is still governed by all of the provisions of the Convention, one of which denies the carrier the benefit of the liability limit under certain conditions.
On the other hand, the difference between the language of Article 3 and that of Articles 4 and 9 casts some doubt on that reading. Evidence from the drafting history of the Convention is therefore helpful in understanding what the contracting governments intended.
Similar provisions were adopted in regard to the baggage check. See id., at 76a-77a, 95a-96a. The report submitted by Henry de Vos, Reporter of the Second Committee, to the full CITEJA, made crystal clear the parallelism of approach adopted for the three types of transportation documents: "The sanction for transporting passengers without regular tickets is the same as that for the transportation of baggage and of goods." Id., at 73a, 92a. Similarly, the report Monsieur de Vos prepared on behalf of CITEJA to accompany its final draft of the Convention contained the following observation: "The sanction provided . . . for carriage of passengers without a ticket or with a ticket not conforming to the Convention is identical to that provided . . . for carriage of baggage and goods." Second International Conference on Private Aeronautical Law Minutes 247 (R. Horner & D. Legrez transl.1975) (emphasis added) (hereinafter Horner & Legrez).
A second observation that can be drawn from the drafting history relates to the purpose of the sanctions clause. This was simply the means chosen by the drafters to compel the air carriers to include on the transportation documents certain "particulars" thought necessary. During the initial stages the drafters had considered requiring the adhering states to impose criminal or civil penalties for failure to comply with the Convention's specifications, but they ultimately accepted a British suggestion that loss of the Convention's benefits should be used as the means of compelling compliance. U.S.App. 35a-36a, 47a-49a, 42a, 54a-55a, 63a, 82a-83a. Thus, the sanction was applied to the failure to include on the transportation documents all of the particulars thought to be essential, but not to certain others whose inclusion was merely recommended. The term "obligatory" was frequently used to refer to the former group. The obligatory particulars were, generally speaking, those relating to the international character of the transportation. Id., at 41a, 54a. These included "the name and address of the carrier." Id., at 43a, 55a. One might today deem that particular unnecessary to demonstrate the international character of the transportation, but that was apparently not the judgment of the drafters, who debated precisely this sort of question, id., at 62a-64a, 82a-83a, and who saw the severe penalty as being the only practicable means of compelling the carriers to include on the travel documents the particulars the drafters considered essential. (The carrier's address might also have been thought necessary to establish the carrier's domicile for jurisdictional purposes under Article 28.) Thus, what the Court considers an "absurd result," ante, at 130, was one precisely intended (at least until the draft reached the Conference floor) by the authors of the Warsaw Convention.
Throughout CITEJA's work on the draft Convention, the Greek delegation had repeatedly objected to the sanctions clause as too harsh. U.S.App. 39a, 51a; 62a-64a, 82a-83a. Its effort at the May 1928 CITEJA meeting to weaken the sanction, by specifying that it should apply only when prejudice was caused by the omission of a particular, was rejected. Id., at 63a-64a, 83a. But at Warsaw, for reasons which do not emerge from the record, a similar Greek amendment, Horner & Legrez 303-304, met with more success. The preparatory committee accepted it to the extent of deleting from Article 3(2) the words, "or if the ticket does not contain the particulars indicated above." Id., at 150.
The parallel provision in Article 4 was treated somewhat differently. A change was made in which particulars were deemed obligatory, but three including the liability statement which became particular (h) remained so; thus, the phrase used in the sanctions clause was "or if the baggage check does not contain the particulars set out at (d), (f), and (h) above." Id., at 156. Articles 8 and 9, concerning the air waybill, were rewritten in a similar fashion. Id., at 157-162.
It is not clear what the reason is for the difference between the final structure of Article 3, on one hand, and Articles 4 and 9, on the other. The Solicitor General views it essentially as a drafting error, resulting from a failure to coordinate the Japanese and Greek amendments. Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 18-21. It is, to be sure, possible that the drafters intended to create a different regime for the passenger ticket than for the baggage check and the air waybill. The latter reading draws some support from the Reporter's explanation of the changes made in Article 4 concerning the baggage check: "The last paragraph was not modified like Ar icle 3; that is to say that we have retained the same sanctions in the case of errors in the particulars. . . ." Horner & Legrez 156. But it is puzzling that such a departure from the fundamental principle of applying the same scheme of sanctions to the passenger ticket, the baggage check, and the waybill would have been made without explanation or acknowledgment. As late as the opening substantive session of the Warsaw Conference itself the CITEJA Reporter, Monsieur de Vos, made clear, as he had at the foregoing CITEJA sessions, the principle of parallel treatment of these three documents.
Only four days later Monsieur de Vos himself presented to the convention the preparatory committee's revision of Article 3; and it is difficult to imagine that, had such a fundamental change on this point been intended, he would not have said so explicitly.
An examination of the Greek proposal that led to the change, as well as what Monsieur de Vos said in presenting it, strengthens the impression that no different treatment of the passenger ticket was intended. The Greek proposal referred to the possibility that the carrier might lose its liability limitation because "by simple negligence the carrier has omitted to mention in the passenger ticket the place of issuance, or the point of departure, or his name and address; or even that he keep his former address in the ticket, or finally he does not point out an intermediate stop." Horner & Legrez 303. The Reporter, in presenting the revision of Article 3 to the plenary session, characterized the Greek concern as follows: "The sanction is too severe when it's a question of a simple omission, of the negligence of an employee of the carrier. . . ." Id., at 150. The focus thus appears to have been on clerical errors in filling in the ticket forms. An intent to remove such errors from the list of those that trigger the sanctionas was done also in Article 4 (but not in Article 8) would not be incompatible with the intent to retain the sanction for failure to include the liability statement, which would hardly result from the same kind of ticket-counter error.
that does not end the matter. Respondent Korean Air Lines undeniably did give petitioners such notice. Petitioners' argument goes beyond this, however, and requires us to determine whether there exists a requirement that the notice given be "adequate," and, if so, whether the notice provided in this case met that standard.
If notice is indeed required, it must surely meet some minimal standard of "adequacy." All would agree, no doubt, that notice that literally could be read only with a magnifying glass would be no notice at all. Lisi, of course, presents a more difficult case. In my view it may well have been correctly decided. But there is a substantial difference between 4-point and 8-point type, particularly where, as here, the notice took the form of the "advice" prescribed by the Montreal Agreement and occupied a separate page in the ticket book. It cannot be said that the notice given here was "camouflaged in Lilliputian print in a thicket of other conditions."
The Warsaw and New Orleans courts did not, of course, find that to be the case where notice was given in 8.5- and 9-point type. Rather, those courts adopted a bright-line rule based on the provision of the Montreal Agreement that requires notice printed in 10-point type. Petitioners here similarly contend that the Montreal Agreement established a bright line which should be taken to define what notice is adequate. I cannot accept this argume t. The Montreal Agreement is a private agreement among airline companies, which cannot and does not purport to amend the Warsaw Convention. To be sure, the Agreement was concluded under pressure from the United States Government, which would otherwise have withdrawn from the Warsaw Convention. See Lowenfeld & Mendelsohn, The United States and the Warsaw Convention, 80 Harv.L.Rev. 497, 546-596 (1967). And most air carriers operating in the United States are required by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Regulations to become parties to the agreement. See 14 CFR pt. 203, § 213.7 (1988); see also 14 CFR § 221.175(a) (1988) (requiring notice of liability limit in 10-point type). But neither the Montreal Agreement nor the federal regulations purport to sanction failure to provide notice according to the Agreement's specifications with loss of the Warsaw Convention's limits on liability. The sanction, rather, can be only whatever penalty is available to the FAA against foreign airlines that fail to abide by the applicable regulations, presumably including suspension or revocation of the airline's permit to operate in the United States. See 49 U.S.C.App. § 1372(f).
Nor does the Solicitor General contend in this case that the Montreal Agreement provides for loss of the liability limit in the event of failure to give the specified notice in 10-point type. His argument is, rather, that the Montreal Agreement and the FAA regulation codified at 14 CFR § 221.175(a) (1988) set a clear and reasonable standard which the courts should adopt as a measure of "adequate notice." Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 24-27. Here, however, the notice given was surely "adequate" under any conventional interpretation of that term. That being so, I cannot agree that we have any license to require that the notice meet some higher standard, merely for the sake of a bright line.
Justice BRENNAN accuses us of being "disingenuous" in saying that this is the only possible reading of Article 3. In the single paragraph supporting this accusation, he offers two arguments to show that Article 3 is "surely susceptible," post, at 137, of another interpretation. First, he thinks it "not at all unreasonable to read the term 'passenger ticket,' when used . . . in Article 3(2)" to mean, not what it meant in Article 3(1), but rather to be a "shorthand for [the] longer phrase" consisting of all the requirements that Article 3(1) says a passenger ticket must contain. It seems to us that this suggested reading is unreasonablenot only because no sensible draftsman would use such strange "shorthand" instead of referring, in Article 3(2), to "such a passenger ticket" rather than simply "passenger ticket," but also because the result produced by the suggested reading is nonsensical. The effect of the concurrence's exegesis can be assessed by substituting for the phrase "the passenger ticket" in Article 3(2) the phrase "a regular passenger ticket"by which we mean (as does the concurrence) a ticket in full compliance with Article 3(1). The first sentence of Article 3(2) then reads, in relevant part: "The . . . irregularity . . . of a regular passenger ticket shall not affect the existence or the validity of the contract of transportation." The only way out of this absurdity is to posit that by "irregularity" Article 3(2) means something other than failure to comply with all the requirements of Article 3(1)but there is no plausible "something other."
Justice BRENNAN's second argument is that the first sentence of Article 3(2) "quite clearly," post, at 137 (emphasis in original), does not have the meaning we have described. As he reads that sentence, when it says that an irregular ticket "shall none the less be subject to the rules of this convention" it means to include among those "rules" the rule of the second sentence, that (as he interprets it) if a "regular passenger ticket" is not delivered the rule limiting liability does not apply. Though this is put forward as a separate argument, it obviously assumes the correctness of the first one, since if "passenger ticket" in the second sentence does not mean a "regular passenger ticket" the "rule" of that second sentence does not apply to the delivery of an "irregular" ticket, as opposed to the delivery of no ticket at all. Quite apart from that flaw, however, it is impossible to read the second sentence as setting forth a "rule" that is included among the "rules" referred to in the first sentence, because that second sentence begins with the word "Nevertheless." It sets forth an exception to the operation of the first sentence not a specification of something already included within it. The latter would be conveyed, not by a new sentence beginning "Nevertheless," but by a new clause beginning "including the rule that." As written, the second sentence plainly conveys the meaning that if the reason for the "absence" of a passenger ticket (covered by the first sentence) is that a passenger ticket was never delivered, the carrier shall "nevertheless"despite the first sentencebe unable to avail himself of the rules excluding or limiting liability.
We may note that the alternative interpretation the concurrence believes it sees in the textwhich would render the omission of any single particular listed in Article 3(1) a basis for imposing the sanction of the second sentence of Article 3(2) is evidently not an interpretation that the concurrence itself is prepared to adopt, since it finds that to have been quite plainly rejected by the drafters. See post, at 146-147. Ultimately, then, even on its own terms the concurrence does not use the drafting history to resolve an ambiguity but rather to depart from any possible reading of the Treaty.
Even if the text were less clear, its most natural meaning could properly be contradicted only by clear drafting history. It is interesting, therefore, that the concurrence, after performing the examination we consider inappropriate, concludes that it is "impossible to say with certainty what the treatymakers at Warsaw intended." Post, at 146. One would think that would be enough to cause the concurrence to resort to the treaty's text. Instead, however, the concurrence shifts to an entirely different mode of analysisone that it could as well have employed at the outset were it not intent upon demonstrating the technique of pursuing drafting history to a dead end. In its last four pages, the concurrence assumes for the sake of argument that there is an "adequate notice" requirement in the Warsaw Conventionan assumption that it justifies by the fact that "[c]ourts in this country have generally read [such a] requirement into the Warsaw Convention." Post, at 149. Of course they have read in such a requirement, and of course determining the validity of doing so rather than assuming itwas the very reason we selected this case for review. The object of our granting writs of certiorari on points of statutory or treaty interpretation is to determine the correctness of fundamental points that lower courts have resolved, not to assume those points to be correct in order to decide particular cases on reasoning useless elsewhere. The concurrence's analysis provides guidance in all cases where notice of liability limitation is provided in 8-point rather than 10-point type. 4-point type, we are told, "may well" yield a different result, see post, at 150 always assuming, of course (what the concurrence does not venture to decide) that the Convention contains an "adequate notice" requirement. As for 6-point type, we have no hint whether that might entail liability if there is any liability for inadequate notice. We choose not to follow a mode of analysis that seems a wasteful expenditure of this Court's time.