Opinion ID: 736223
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Statutory Scheme and Supreme Court Precedent

Text: 14 Under the Jones Act, seamen are afforded rights parallel to those of railway employees under the Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA). 46 U.S.C. § 688. Section 51 of the FELA provides, in pertinent part, that [e]very common carrier by railroad ... shall be liable in damages ... for such injury or death resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of any of the officers, agents, or employees of such carrier. 45 U.S.C. § 51 (emphasis added). A seaman is entitled to recovery under the Jones Act, therefore, if his employer's negligence is the cause, in whole or in part, of his injury. In their earlier articulations of § 51 liability, courts had replaced the phrase in whole or in part with the adjective slightest. In Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 352 U.S. 500, 506, 77 S.Ct. 443, 448, 1 L.Ed.2d 493 (1957), the Supreme Court used the term slightest to describe the reduced standard of causation between the employer's negligence and the employee's injury in FELA § 51 cases. In Ferguson v. Moore-McCormack Lines, Inc., 352 U.S. 521, 523, 77 S.Ct. 457, 458, 1 L.Ed.2d 511 (1957), the Court applied the same standard to a Jones Act case, writing,  'Under this statute the test of a jury case is simply whether the proofs justify with reason the conclusion that employer negligence played any part, even the slightest, in producing the injury or death for which damages are sought.'  (quoting Rogers, 352 U.S. at 506, 77 S.Ct. at 448). 15 Nothing in these cases, then, supports the proposition that the duty of care owed is slight. Rather, the phrase in whole or in part as set forth in the statute, or, as it has come to be known, slightest, modifies only the causation prong of the inquiry. The phrase does not also modify the word negligence. The duty of care owed, therefore, under normal rules of statutory construction, retains the usual and familiar definition of ordinary prudence. See Texas Food Indus. Assoc. v. United States Dept. of Agriculture, 81 F.3d 578, 582 (5th Cir.1996) (stating it is a cardinal canon of statutory construction ... that [in interpreting a statute,] the words of a statute will be given their plain meaning). 16 Despite the clarity of the Supreme Court's decisions, the word slightest, used initially to refer to the quantum of evidence of an employer's breach of duty necessary to sustain a jury verdict, soon took on a different referent. Once the Supreme Court had reduced the statutory language in whole or in part to any part, even the slightest, it was not long before our court further reduced the phrase any part, even the slightest to a shorthand expression of slight negligence or slight evidence of negligence. Thereafter we used the phrase slight negligence uncritically. Justice Frankfurter's comment on the (mis)use of the phrase assumption of the risk in FELA actions aptly applies to our discussion today: A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas. Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 318 U.S. 54, 68, 63 S.Ct. 444, 452, 87 L.Ed. 610 (1943) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). The same holds true of our use of the phrase slight negligence or slight care in Jones Act negligence cases. 17 Guided by the Supreme Court, we had initially employed the phrase slight negligence as a shorthand expression for the standard by which we measure, in our review of a jury verdict, the sufficiency of evidence establishing a causal link between an employer's negligence and a seaman's injury. Significantly, an employer's duty of care always remained that of ordinary negligence. Soon, however, we began using the phrase slight negligence to refer not only to the sufficiency of the evidence inquiry but also to that duty of care Jones Act employers owed to their employees. A plaintiff, therefore, could now reach the jury not only with slight evidence of his employer's negligence, but also with slight evidence of his employer having been only slightly negligent. Once we had characterized the phrase slight negligence as shorthand to depict a duty of care owed by an employer to its employee, it was not long before we also used the phrase to represent the plaintiff's duty of care to protect himself from work-related injuries. We did so by rephrasing slight negligence to slight care. 18 Historically, then, Jones Act employers and seamen were expressly bound to a standard of ordinary prudence; when the phrase slight negligence came to stand for the duty of care owed by employers and employees, however, employers were understood to be held to a higher degree of personal responsibility as to their employees, and plaintiff-seamen were understood to be held to a lower degree of personal responsibility for themselves. We hold that the historical interpretation always should have been, and should now be, applied in this Circuit. We offer the following survey of our case law, however, to illustrate just how we devolved from the Supreme Court's pronouncements in Rogers and Ferguson to our settled law today. 19