Opinion ID: 105825
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: jurisdiction

Text: (a) Jurisdiction under the Jones Act. The District Court dismissed petitioner's Jones Act claims for lack of jurisdiction. As frequently happens where jurisdiction depends on subject matter, the question whether jurisdiction exists has been confused with the question whether the complaint states a cause of action. Montana-Dakota Utilities Co. v. Northwestern Public Service Co., 341 U. S. 246, 249. Petitioner asserts a substantial claim that the Jones Act affords him a right of recovery for the negligence of his employer. Such assertion alone is sufficient to empower the District Court to assume jurisdiction over the case and determine whether, in fact, the Act does provide the claimed rights. A cause of action under our law was asserted here, and the court had power to determine whether it was or was not well founded in law and in fact. Lauritzen v. Larsen, 345 U. S. 571, 575. (b) Jurisdiction under 28 U. S. C. § 1331. Petitioner, a Spanish subject, asserts claims under the general maritime law against Compania Trasatlantica, a Spanish corporation. The jurisdiction of the Federal District Court, sitting as a court of law, was invoked under the provisions of the Judiciary Act of 1875 which granted jurisdiction to the lower federal courts of all suits of a civil nature at common law or in equity, . . . arising under the Constitution or laws of the United States, . . . . (now 28 U. S. C. § 1331). [5] Whether the Act of 1875 permits maritime claims rooted in federal law to be brought on the law side of the lower federal courts has recently been raised in litigation and has become the subject of conflicting decisions among Courts of Appeals. Jurisdiction has been sustained in the First Circuit, Doucette v. Vincent, 194 F. 2d 834, and denied in the Second and Third, Jordine v. Walling, 185 F. 2d 662; Paduano v. Yamashita Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha, 221 F. 2d 615. See also Jenkins v. Roderick, 156 F. Supp. 299. Such conflict in the construction of an old and important statute calls for a full exposition of the problem. Abstractly stated, the problem is the ordinary task of a court to apply the words of a statute according to their proper construction. But proper construction is not satisfied by taking the words as if they were self-contained phrases. So considered, the words do not yield the meaning of the statute. The words we have to construe are not only words with a history. They express an enactment that is part of a serial, and a serial that must be related to Article III of the Constitution, the watershed of all judiciary legislation, and to the enactments which have derived from that Article. Moreover, Article III itself has its sources in history. These give content and meaning to its pithy phrases. Rationally construed, the Act of 1875 must be considered part of an organic growthpart of the evolutionary process of judiciary legislation that began September 24, 1789, and projects into the future. Article III, § 2. cl. 1 (3d provision) of the Constitution and section 9 of the Act of September 24, 1789, have from the beginning been the sources of jurisdiction in litigation based upon federal maritime law. Article III impliedly contained three grants. (1) It empowered Congress to confer admiralty and maritime jurisdiction on the Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court which were authorized by Art. I, § 8, cl. 9. (2) It empowered the federal courts in their exercise of the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction which had been conferred on them, to draw on the substantive law inherent in the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 55, and to continue the development of this law within constitutional limits. (3) It empowered Congress to revise and supplement the maritime law within the limits of the Constitution. See Crowell v. Benson, supra, at 55. Section 9 of the First Judiciary Act [6] granted the District Courts maritime jurisdiction. This jurisdiction has remained unchanged in substance to the present day. [7] Indeed it was recognition of the need for federal tribunals to exercise admiralty jurisdiction that was one of the controlling considerations for the establishment of a system of lower federal courts. [8] Such a system is not an inherent requirement of a federal government. There was strong opposition in the Constitutional Convention to any such inferior federal tribunals. [9] No comprehensive system of lower federal courts has been established in Canada or Australia. Congress could leave the enforcement of federal rights to state courts, [10] and indeed the state courts, in large measure, now exercise concurrent jurisdiction over a wide field of matters of federal concern, subject to review of federal issues by the Supreme Court. [11] Section 9 not only established federal courts for the administration of maritime law; it recognized that some remedies in matters maritime had been traditionally administered by common-law courts of the original States. [12] This role of the States in the administration of maritime law was preserved in the famous saving clausesaving to suitors, in all cases, the right of a common-law remedy, where the common law is competent to give it. [13] Since the original Judiciary Act also endowed the federal courts with diversity jurisdiction, common-law remedies for maritime causes could be enforced by then Circuit Courts when the proper diversity of parties afforded access. Up to the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1875 [14] these jurisdictional bases provided the only claim for jurisdiction in the federal courts in maritime matters. [15] The District Courts, endowed with exclusive original cognizance of all civil causes of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, sat to enforce the comprehensive federal interest in the law of the sea which had been a major reason for their creation. This jurisdiction was exercised according to the historic procedure in admiralty, by a judge without a jury. In addition, common-law remedies were, under the saving clause, enforcible in the courts of the States and on the common-law side of the lower federal courts when the diverse citizenship of the parties permitted. Except in diversity cases, maritime litigation brought in state courts could not be removed to the federal courts. [16] The Judiciary Act of 1875 effected an extensive enlargement of the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts. For the first time their doors were opened to all suits of a civil nature at common law or in equity, . . . arising under the Constitution or laws of the United States, or treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority. . . . [17] From 1875 to 1950 there is not to be found a hint or suggestion to cast doubt on the conviction that the language of that statute was taken straight from Art. III, § 2, cl. 1, extending the judicial power of the United States to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority. Indeed what little legislative history there is affirmatively indicates that this was the source. [18] Thus the Act of 1875 drew on the scope of this provision of Clause 1, just as the Judiciary Act of 1789 reflected the constitutional authorization of Clause 1 of Section 2, which extended the judicial power to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction. These provisions of Article III are two of the nine separately enumerated classes of cases to which judicial power was extended by the Constitution and which thereby authorized grants by Congress of judicial Power to the inferior federal courts. The vast stream of litigation which has flowed through these courts from the beginning has done so on the assumption that, in dealing with a subject as technical as the jurisdiction of the courts, the Framers, predominantly lawyers, used precise, differentiating and not redundant language. This assumption, reflected in The Federalist Papers, [19] was authoritatively confirmed by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall in American Ins. Co. v. Canter, 1 Pet. 511, 544: We are therefore to inquire, whether cases in admiralty, and cases arising under the laws and Constitution of the United States, are identical. If we have recourse to that pure fountain from which all the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts is derived, we find language employed which cannot well be misunderstood. The Constitution declares, that `the judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority; to all cases affecting ambassadors, or other public ministers, and consuls; to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction.' The Constitution certainly contemplates these as three distinct classes of cases; and if they are distinct, the grant of jurisdiction over one of them does not confer jurisdiction over either of the other two. The discrimination made between them, in the Constitution, is, we think, conclusive against their identity. See also The Sarah, 8 Wheat. 391. This lucid principle of constitutional construction, embodied in one of Marshall's frequently quoted opinions, was never brought into question until 1952. [20] It had been treated as black-letter law in leading treatises. [21] It was part of the realm of legal ideas in which the authors of the Act of 1875 moved. Certainly the accomplished lawyers who drafted the Act of 1875 [22] drew on the language of the constitutional grant on the assumption that they were dealing with a distinct class of cases, that the language incorporated in their enactment precluded identity with any other class of cases contained in Article III. Thus the grant of jurisdiction over suits of a civil nature at common law or in equity . . . arising under the Constitution or laws of the United States . . . , in the Act of 1875, as derived from Article III, could not reasonably be thought of as comprehending an entirely separate and distinct class of casesCases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction. [23] Of course all cases to which judicial power extends arise, in a comprehensive, non-jurisdictional sense of the term, under this Constitution. It is the Constitution that is the ultimate source of all judicial Powerdefines grants and implies limitsand so all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction arise under the Constitution in the sense that they have constitutional sanction. But they are not Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States . . . . Not only does language and construction point to the rejection of any infusion of general maritime jurisdiction into the Act of 1875, but history and reason powerfully support that rejection. The far-reaching extension of national power resulting from the victory of the North, and the concomitant utilization of federal courts for the vindication of that power in the Reconstruction Era, naturally led to enlarged jurisdiction of the federal courts over federal rights. But neither the aim of the Act of 1875 to provide a forum for the vindication of new federally created rights, nor the pressures which led to its enactment, suggest, even remotely, the inclusion of maritime claims within the scope of that statute. The provision of the Act of 1875 with which we are concerned was designed to give a new content of jurisdiction to the federal courts, not to reaffirm one long-established, smoothly functioning since 1789. [24] We have uncovered no basis for finding the additional design of changing the method by which federal courts had administered admiralty law from the beginning. The federal admiralty courts had been completely adequate to the task of protecting maritime rights rooted in federal law. There is not the slightest indication of any intention, or of any professional or lay demands for a change in the time-sanctioned mode of trying suits in admiralty without a jury, from which it can be inferred that by the new grant of jurisdiction of cases arising under the Constitution or laws a drastic innovation was impliedly introduced in admiralty procedure, whereby Congress changed the method by which federal courts had administered admiralty law for almost a century. To draw such an inference is to find that a revolutionary procedural change had undesignedly come to pass. If we are now to attribute such a result to Congress the sole remaining justification for the federal admiralty courts which have played such a vital role in our federal judicial system for 169 years will be to provide a federal forum for the small number of maritime claims which derive from state law, and to afford the ancient remedy of a libel in rem in those limited instances when an in personam judgment would not suffice to satisfy a claim. [25] Indeed, until 1950, in a dictum in Jansson v. Swedish American Line, 185 F. 2d 212, 217-218 (C. A. 1st Cir.), followed by an opinion in Doucette v. Vincent, 194 F. 2d 834, judges, scholars and lawyers alike made the unquestioned assumption that the original maritime jurisdiction of the federal courts had, for all practical purposes, been left unchanged since the Act of 1789. Thus Mr. Justice Clifford, an experienced admiralty judge, in 1876, one year after the passage of the Act here in question, could reiterate the classic formulation without the faintest indication of doubt as to its continued vitality. Parties in maritime cases are not . . . compelled to proceed in the admiralty at all, as they may resort to their common-law remedy in the State courts, or in the Circuit Court, if the party seeking redress and the other party are citizens of different States. [26] On the basis of an examination of sixty-six treatises on federal jurisdiction and on admiralty, and of a search of the reports it can be confidently asserted that for the seventy-four years following Mr. Justice Clifford's opinion there is not a single professional utterance of legal opinionby judges, lawyers, or commentatorsdisagreeing with his formulation. [27] Negative testimony is often as compelling as bits of affirmative evidence. It is especially compelling when it comes from those whose scholarly or professional specialty was the jurisdiction of the federal courts and the practice of maritime law. Petitioner now asks us to hold that no student of the jurisdiction of the federal courts or of admiralty, no judge, and none of the learned and alert members of the admiralty bar were able, for seventy-five years, to discern the drastic change now asserted to have been contrived in admiralty jurisdiction by the Act of 1875. In light of such impressive testimony from the past the claim of a sudden discovery of a hidden latent meaning in an old technical phrase is surely suspect. The history of archaeology is replete with the unearthing of riches buried for centuries. Our legal history does not, however, offer a single archaeological discovery of new, revolutionary meaning in reading an old judiciary enactment. [27a] The presumption is powerful that such a farreaching, dislocating construction as petitioner would now have us find in the Act of 1875 was not uncovered by judges, lawyers or scholars for seventy-five years because it is not there. It is also significant that in the entire history of federal maritime legislation, whether before the passage of the Act of 1875 ( e. g., the Great Lakes Actalso a general jurisdictional statute and one often termed an anomaly in the maritime law because of its jury trial provision), or after (the Jones Act), Congress has not once left the availability of a trial on the law side to inference. It has made specific provision. [28] It is difficult to accept that in 1875, and in 1875 alone, a most far-reaching change was made subterraneously. Not only would the infusion of general maritime jurisdiction into the Act of 1875 disregard the obvious construction of that statute. Important difficulties of judicial policy would flow from such an interpretation, an interpretation which would have a disruptive effect on the traditional allocation of power over maritime affairs in our federal system. Thus the historic option of a maritime suitor pursuing a common-law remedy to select his forum, state or federal, would be taken away by an expanded view of § 1331, [29] since saving-clause actions would then be freely removable under § 1441 of Title 28. [30] The interpretation of the Act of 1875 contended for would have consequences more deeply felt than the elimination of a suitor's traditional choice of forum. By making maritime cases removable to the federal courts it would make considerable inroads into the traditionally exercised concurrent jurisdiction of the state courts in admiralty mattersa jurisdiction which it was the unquestioned aim of the saving clause of 1789 to preserve. This disruption of principle is emphasized by the few cases actually involved. [31] This small number of cases is only important in that it negatives the pressure of any practical consideration for the subversion of a principle so long-established and so deeply rooted. The role of the States in the development of maritime law is a role whose significance is rooted in the Judiciary Act of 1789 and the decisions of this Court. [32] Recognition of the part the States have played from the beginning has a dual significance. It indicates the extent to which an expanded view of the Act of 1875 would eviscerate the postulates of the saving clause, and it undermines the theoretical basis for giving the Act of 1875 a brand new meaning. Although the corpus of admiralty law is federal in the sense that it derives from the implications of Article III evolved by the courts, to claim that all enforced rights pertaining to matters maritime are rooted in federal law is a destructive oversimplification of the highly intricate interplay of the States and the National Government in their regulation of maritime commerce. It is true that state law must yield to the needs of a uniform federal maritime law when this Court finds inroads on a harmonious system. [33] But this limitation still leaves the States a wide scope. State-created liens are enforced in admiralty. [34] State remedies for wrongful death and state statutes providing for the survival of actions, both historically absent from the relief offered by the admiralty, [35] have been upheld when applied to maritime causes of action. [36] Federal courts have enforced these statutes. [37] State rules for the partition and sale of ships, [38] state laws governing the specific performance of arbitration agreements, [39] state laws regulating the effect of a breach of warranty under contracts of maritime insurance [40] all these laws and others have been accepted as rules of decision in admiralty cases, even, at times, when they conflicted with a rule of maritime law which did not require uniformity. In the field of maritime contracts, this Court has said, as in that of maritime torts, the National Government has left much regulatory power in the States. [41] Thus, if one thing is clear it is that the source of law in saving-clause actions cannot be described in absolute terms. Maritime law is not a monistic system. The State and Federal Governments jointly exert regulatory powers today as they have played joint roles in the development of maritime law throughout our history. [42] This sharing of competence in one aspect of our federalism has been traditionally embodied in the saving clause of the Act of 1789. Here, as is so often true in our federal system, allocations of jurisdiction have been carefully wrought to correspond to the realities of power and interest and national policy. To give a novel sweep to the Act would disrupt traditional maritime policies and quite gratuitously disturb a complementary, historic interacting federal-state relationship. An infusion of general maritime jurisdiction into the federal question grant would not occasion merely an isolated change; it would generate many new complicated problems. If jurisdiction of maritime claims were allowed to be invoked under § 1331, it would become necessary for courts to decide whether the action arises under federal law, and this jurisdictional decision would largely depend on whether the governing law is state or federal. Determinations of this nature are among the most difficult and subtle that federal courts are called upon to make. [43] Last Term's decision in McAllister v. Magnolia Petroleum Co., 357 U. S. 221, illustrates the difficulties raised by the attempted application of a state statute of limitations to maritime personal injury actions. These problems result from the effort to fit state laws into the scheme of federal maritime law. These difficulties, while nourishing academic speculation, have rarely confronted the courts. This Court has been able to wait until an actual conflict between state and federal standards has arisen, and only then proceed to resolve the problem of whether the State was free to regulate or federal law must govern. For example, if a State allowed the survival of a cause of action based on unseaworthiness as defined in the maritime law it was immaterial whether the standard was federal and governed by decisions of this Court, or was subject to state variations. [44] Thus we have been able to deal with such conceptual problems in the context of a specific conflict and a specific application of policy, as is so well illustrated by the McAllister case. However, such practical considerations for adjudication would be unavailable under an expanded view of § 1331. Federal courts would be forced to determine the respective spheres of state and federal legislative competence, the source of the governing law, as a preliminary question of jurisdiction; for only if the applicable law is federal law would jurisdiction be proper under § 1331. The necessity for jurisdictional determinations couched in terms of state or federal law would destroy that salutary flexibility which enables the courts to deal with source-of-law problems in light of the necessities illuminated by the particular question to be answered. Certainly sound judicial policy does not encourage a situation which necessitates constant adjudication of the boundaries of state and federal competence. Typical also of the consequences that are implicit in this proposed modification of maritime jurisdiction, is the restriction of venue that would result from this novel interpretation of § 1331 of the Act of 1875. Litigants of diverse citizenship are now able to invoke the federal law forum for the trial of saving-clause cases. Such litigants are aided in their search for a federal forum by the liberality of the venue provisions applicable to actions based on diversity of citizenship. These provisions allow the action to be brought either where all plaintiffs or all defendants reside. [45] If saving-clause actions were to be brought within the scope of § 1331, this choice could be no longer made. Plaintiffs would be subject to the rigid requirement that suit must be brought only in the judicial district where all defendants reside . . . , [46] and this would be so even where there is, in fact, diversity of citizenship. [47] In the face of the consistent and compelling inferences to be drawn from history and policy against a break with a long past in the application of the Act of 1875, what justification is offered for this novel view of the statute? Support is ultimately reduced, one is compelled to say, to empty logic, reflecting a formal syllogism. The argument may thus be fairly summarized. It was not until recently, in a line of decision culminating in Pope & Talbot, Inc., v. Hawn, 346 U. S. 406, that it became apparent that the source of admiralty rights was a controlling body of federal admiralty law. This development led to a deepened consideration of the jurisdictional consequences of the federal source of maritime law. And so one turns to the Act of 1875. The Act of 1875 gave original jurisdiction to the federal courts over all cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the United States. Maritime law was federal law based on a constitutional grant of jurisdiction. Thus maritime cases arose under the Constitution or federal laws. By this mode of reasoning the words of the jurisdictional statute are found to fit like a glove. [48] Although it is true that the supremacy of federal maritime law over conflicting state law has recently been greatly extended, the federal nature of the maritime law administered in the federal courts has long been an accepted part of admiralty jurisprudence. The classic statement of Mr. Justice Holmes in The Western Maid, 257 U. S. 419, 432, summed up the accepted view that maritime law derived its force from the National Government and was part of the laws of the United States; and this was merely a restatement of a view which was clearly set forth in 1874 in The Lottawanna, 21 Wall. 558. [49] Thus the theory which underlies the effort to infuse general maritime jurisdiction into the Act of 1875 rests on no novel development in maritime law, but on premises as available in 1875 as they are today. The simple language of the Act of 1875 conceals complexities of construction and policy which have been already examined. When we apply to the statute, and to the clause of Article III from which it is derived, commonsensical and lawyer-like modes of construction, and the evidence of history and logic, it becomes clear that the words of that statute do not extend, and could not reasonably be interpreted to extend, to cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. The statute is phrased in terms which, as a matter of inert language, lifeless words detached from the interpretive setting of history, legal lore, and due regard for the interests of our federal system, may be used as playthings with which to reconstruct the Act to include cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. If the history of the interpretation of judiciary legislation teaches anything, it teaches the duty to reject treating such statutes as a wooden set of self-sufficient wordsa failing to which the Court has not been subject since the Pacific Railroad Removal Cases. [50] The Act of 1875 is broadly phrased, but it has been continuously construed and limited in the light of the history that produced it, the demands of reason and coherence, and the dictates of sound judicial policy which have emerged from the Act's function as a provision in the mosaic of federal judiciary legislation. It is a statute, not a Constitution, we are expounding. [51] The considerations of history and policy which investigation has illuminated are powerfully reinforced by the deeply felt and traditional reluctance of this Court to expand the jurisdiction of the federal courts through a broad reading of jurisdictional statutes. A reluctance which must be even more forcefully felt when the expansion is proposed, for the first time, eighty-three years after the jurisdiction has been conferred. Mr. Justice Stone, speaking of the Act of 1875, pointed out that [t]he policy of the statute calls for its strict construction. . . . Due regard for the rightful independence of state governments, which should actuate federal courts, requires that they scrupulously confine their own jurisdiction to the precise limits which the statute has defined. [52] Certainly this wise counsel is deeply persuasive when we are asked to accept a doctrine which would cut into a jurisdiction exercised by the States since Colonial days. Of course if compelling reasons can be found for redefining the statute, if an ancient error cries out for rectification, we should not be deterred from applying new illuminations to the interpretation of past enactments. However, in our examination of the manifold considerations of history, of construction, of the policy which underlies the allocation of competence over maritime matters in our federal system, and the considerations of judicial administration and procedure called into questionall of which direct us to the rejection of the proposed infusion of general maritime jurisdiction into the Act of 1875we are pointed to no considerations which lead us to overturn the existing maritime jurisdictional systema system which is as old, and as justified by the experience of history, as the federal courts themselves. (c) Pendent and Diversity Jurisdiction. Rejection of the proposed new reading of § 1331 does not preclude consideration of petitioner's claims under the general maritime law. These claims cannot, we have seen, be justified under § 1331. However, the District Court may have jurisdiction of them pendent to its jurisdiction under the Jones Act. Of course the considerations which call for the exercise of pendent jurisdiction of a state claim related to a pending federal cause of action within the appropriate scope of the doctrine of Hurn v. Oursler, 289 U. S. 238, are not the same when, as here, what is involved are related claims based on the federal maritime law. We perceive no barrier to the exercise of pendent jurisdiction in the very limited circumstances before us. Here we merely decide that a district judge has jurisdiction to determine whether a cause of action has been stated if that jurisdiction has been invoked by a complaint at law rather than by a libel in admiralty, as long as the complaint also properly alleges a claim under the Jones Act. We are not called upon to decide whether the District Court may submit to the jury the pendent claims under the general maritime law in the event that a cause of action be found to exist. Respondents Garcia & Diaz and Quin Lumber Company, New York corporations, and International Terminal Operating Company, a Delaware corporation, are of diverse citizenship from the petitioner, a Spanish subject. Since the Jones Act provides an independent basis of federal jurisdiction over the non-diverse respondent, Compania Trasatlantica, the rule of Strawbridge v. Curtiss, 3 Cranch 267, does not require dismissal of the claims against the diverse respondents. Accordingly, the dismissal of these claims for lack of jurisdiction was erroneous.