Opinion ID: 2960144
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: General Negligence

Text: The parties disagree on whether there is an issue of general negligence in this case that was determined by the district court. In its decision, the district court stated that the ship-owning 13 interests and the cargo owners separately advanced failure to warn and negligence claims. Id. at 672–73. Yet when finding PPG liable, the district court applied what appears to be a single legal test. The court found both that the calhypo was “unreasonably dangerous when it left PPG’s control” and that “PPG failed to give adequate warnings on the handling and transportation of the product.” Id. at 673. As a result, the ship-owning and cargo interests argue that the district court found PPG liable on both general negligence and for negligent failure to warn, while PPG argues that the district court rested its decision solely on failure to warn. More specifically, the shipowning interests argue that PPG was negligent in its packaging of the calhypo, in its certification that the calhypo was safe for transport, in failing to request refrigerated or on-deck stowage, and for other oversights in its actions surrounding the calhypo. At trial, however, the arguments made by the parties indicated that they understood the general negligence claim to be a variation of negligence per se based on PPG’s alleged violation of 49 C.F.R. § 173.21(f). Section 173.21(f) prohibits transport of material “which is likely to decompose with a self-accelerated decomposition temperature (SADT) of 50° C (122° F) or less . . . with an evolution of a dangerous quantity of heat or gas when decomposing . . . unless the material is stabilized or inhibited in a manner to preclude such evolution.” For example, when clarifying the different legal theories of the case, an attorney for the cargo interests stated that failure to warn was “the principal negligence theory” but that the case also raised the issue of “[v]iolation of [DOT] regulations when they shipped the goods.” Furthermore, in PPG’s closing arguments it stated that “the claim against PPG is grounded in 49 CFR, the assertion that this was a ‘forbidden’ material and that therefore PPG should not have shipped it unless it did so in refrigerated containers.” 14 The district court’s opinion, however, does not mention negligence per se, nor does it devote much attention to PPG’s compliance with § 173.21(f). Though the opinion contains broad language suggesting that PPG breached its general duty of due care, see Harmony, 394 F. Supp. 2d at 674 (“[A] reasonable manufacturer would have done more than PPG did here.”), its primary focus was on PPG’s duty to warn. In its clearest recital of the elements of the claim, the court found that PPG “had a duty to provide a warning that would fully inform vessels and others in the distribution chain of all the risks involved in shipping cal-hypo in the manner in which it was shipped here. PPG breached that duty.” Id. at 675. We therefore agree with PPG that the district court did not find PPG liable on a general negligence theory. To the extent that the district court’s opinion can be understood to make such a finding, we reverse because the district court provided no basis for a finding of general negligence other than the incorrect one of unreasonable dangerousness (a strict liability doctrine).