Opinion ID: 736223
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Our Departure from the Standard of Reasonable Care

Text: 20 In Page v. St. Louis Southwestern Railway Co., 349 F.2d 820, 823 (5th Cir.1965), we kept the standards for determining duty of care and causation distinct when we clarified that in FELA cases, the traditional standard for determining negligence applied: 21 As to both attack or defense, there are two common elements, (1) negligence, i.e., the standard of care, and (2) causation, i.e., the relation of the negligence to the injury. So far as negligence is concerned, that standard is the same--ordinary prudence--for both Employee and Railroad alike. 22 In Boeing Co. v. Shipman, 411 F.2d 365 (5th Cir.1969) (en banc), however, the standards became more nebulous. We misinterpreted Rogers 's any part, even the slightest language to refer not to the evidence necessary to support a jury verdict, but to an employer's duty of care. We concluded that [s]light negligence, necessary to support an [sic] FELA action, is defined as 'a failure to exercise great care,' and that burden of proof, obviously, is much less than the burden required to sustain recovery in ordinary negligence actions. Id. at 371. Thus, in Boeing, we broadened the scope of a FELA--and by implication Jones Act--action insofar as we exposed employers to a higher degree of care and thus more liability than they otherwise would be exposed to in ordinary negligence actions. 23 In the following years, we vacillated considerably in our pronunciations of the proper standard of care. In Perry v. Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, 528 F.2d 1378 (5th Cir.1976), we did not follow Boeing 's articulation of an employer's duty, applying instead the traditional standard of that of a reasonable person. In Perry, the defendant appealed the district court's judgment for the plaintiff, maintaining that the court's finding of Jones Act liability was unsupported by the evidence. We acknowledged that the amount of evidence required to support a jury verdict was slight, and held that an employer was guided by a duty of reasonable care. Perry, a case involving solely the issue of sufficiency of the evidence, was therefore properly decided under the Supreme Court's decisions in Rogers and Ferguson. In Davis v. Hill Engineering, Inc., 549 F.2d 314 (5th Cir.1977), overruled on other grounds, 688 F.2d 280 (5th Cir.1982), however, we regressed. Although we held that a finding of Jones Act liability could be sustained upon evidence of only the slightest negligence, in the very next sentence, we affirmed the district court's use of the reasonable person standard in determining Jones Act liability. Id. at 329. Interestingly, we cited Sanford Bros. Boats, Inc. v. Vidrine, 412 F.2d 958 (5th Cir.1969) and Perry to support our holding that evidence of only the slightest negligence would suffice. Id. As noted, however, Perry, dealt solely with the issue of causation and did not adopt Boeing 's slight negligence standard. Moreover, Sanford Bros., which has often been cited erroneously as the progenitor of our slight negligence standard, neither applied the slight negligence standard of care nor mentioned it in the course of its opinion, as the case concerned only the causation prong of the inquiry. That we mis-cited these cases, which both dealt solely with whether the evidence of the employer's negligence supported the jury verdict of Jones Act liability, demonstrates our early predilection to confuse the standard for sufficiency of the evidence and the standard of care a Jones Act employer owes to his employees. 24 Later, in Ivy v. Security Barge Lines, Inc., 585 F.2d 732, 741 (5th Cir.1978), modified on other grounds, 606 F.2d 524 (5th Cir.1979) (en banc), cert. denied, 446 U.S. 956, 100 S.Ct. 2927, 64 L.Ed.2d 815 (1980), we reverted back to our statement in Perry and held that a Jones Act employer is negligent only if he fails to use reasonable care to maintain a reasonably safe place to work. We appear to have switched courses again, however, in Allen v. Seacoast Products, Inc., 623 F.2d 355, 361 (5th Cir.1980), in which we held that [t]he remedial nature of the Jones Act and its imposition of a higher standard of care on employers results in liability upon the showing of only 'slight negligence.'  (citing Davis v. Hill Engineering, Inc., 549 F.2d 314, 329 (5th Cir.1977)). Thereafter, we backtracked from this position to other prior ones when we explicitly stated that the same general negligence ('ordinary prudence') and causation standards apply to both employer and employee in Federal Employers' Liability Act (and, by extension, Jones Act) cases. Gavagan v. United States, 955 F.2d 1016, 1019 n. 7 (5th Cir.1992). 25 Our decisions imputing to Jones Act employers a higher duty of care than that imposed on all other employers stretch the Supreme Court's decisions in Rogers and Ferguson quite far. Our decisions discussing an employee's duty of care stretch farther. In Spinks v. Chevron Oil Co., 507 F.2d 216 (5th Cir.1975), clarified on other grounds, 546 F.2d 675 (5th Cir.1977), we not only reaffirmed the high standard of care to which we had bound Jones Act employers, but we also announced that a seaman-employee owes only a slight duty to protect himself. We stated, The duty owed by an employer to a seaman is so broad that it encompasses the duty to provide a safe place to work. By comparison, the seaman's duty to protect himself ... is slight. Id. at 223 (internal citations omitted). 26 Spinks, however, was not the definitive word on the issue. Just as we had done for the standard of care to be applied to maritime employers, we vacillated--often in the same opinion--as to the duty a seaman owed to look after his own safety, describing this duty as one of both reasonableness and slight care. For example, in Bobb v. Modern Products, Inc., 648 F.2d 1051, 1057 (5th Cir.1981), we held that the seaman has some duty to use reasonable care, even though that duty is slight. Similarly, in Ceja v. Mike Hooks, Inc., 690 F.2d 1191, 1193 (5th Cir.1982), we wrote: 27 In contrast to the broad duty imposed upon a vessel owner to supply a safe work place, the seaman's duty to protect himself is slight. Although the seaman has a duty to use reasonable care, this duty is tempered by the realities of maritime employment which have been deemed ... to place large responsibility for his safety on the owner. 28 (citations omitted). One year later, in Thezan v. Maritime Overseas Corp., 708 F.2d 175 (5th Cir.1983), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 1050, 104 S.Ct. 729, 79 L.Ed.2d 189 (1984), we relied on Bobb to define a seaman's duty of care, but neglected to include Bobb 's element of reasonableness in our definition. We held that [w]hile the seaman's duty to protect himself is slight, the duty does exist. Id. at 180. Within the same paragraph, however, we did point out that although a seaman generally owes no duty to find the safest way to perform his work, where it is shown that there existed a safe alternative available of which he knew or should have known, a seaman's course of action can be properly considered in determining whether he was negligent. Id. at 181 (emphasis added). Our design in Thezan may have been to continue holding seamen to a standard of ordinary prudence, but we failed to clearly articulate that intention. See also Shipman v. Central Gulf Lines, Inc., 709 F.2d 383, 386 (5th Cir.1983) (perpetuating the ambiguity). 29 We were quite explicit, however, in Brooks v. Great Lakes Dredge-Dock Co., 754 F.2d 536 (5th Cir.1984), modified on other grounds, 754 F.2d 539 (5th Cir.1985), when we expressly rejected any definition of a seaman's duty of care that sounded in ordinary prudence. We held that the district court erred by instructing the jury that the injured party had a duty of ordinary care for his own safety and emphasized, somewhat erroneously, that [t]his court ... has consistently held that under the Jones Act, a seaman's duty to protect himself is not ordinary care, but slight care. Id. at 538. Brooks 's explicit proclamation did not last. Our clear waters were made murky in Pickle v. International Oilfield Divers, Inc., 791 F.2d 1237, 1240 (5th Cir.1986), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1059, 107 S.Ct. 939, 93 L.Ed.2d 989 (1987), when we reinserted the element of reasonableness in our definition of the standard to which seamen are bound and held that the plaintiff's duty to protect himself is only a slight duty to use reasonable care. Again, we raise Gavagan to illustrate that, in 1992, we came full circle from where we began in Page when we stated in rather explicit terms that the standards of reasonable care guide the duties of both employers and employees under the Jones Act. Gavagan, 955 F.2d at 1019 n. 7.