Opinion ID: 391190
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the advantages of hindsight

Text: 46 There is no vision which is as clear as hindsight. Images come into almost perfect focus through the evidentiary microscope of a lawyer's hindsight. After thousands of daily and weekly occurrences of maritime life are discarded, the lawyer can isolate a few incidents for examination with such a microscope to document things such as privity or knowledge. This process proceeds as if a reasonable person had no other responsibilities or phenomena or events to observe other than those incidents now carefully isolated and focused on through this hindsight perspective. If life were so simple, foreseeability under the law would be the equivalent of omniscience. 47 We feel that the appellees in this case have built such a hindsight microscope slide one that is patently divorced from reality. Scattered and isolated items taken out of context were presented to the court, and, surprisingly, the trial judge found a nexus of interrelationships to establish privity and knowledge. These findings defy the realities of life even when recognizing a shipowner's undelegable obligation to correct equipment that is known to be defective. The most significant gap which the trial judge failed to appreciate involved a four-and-a-half-year span during which appellants at no time had any realistic notice that the astern guardian valve on the QUEENY was functionally defective.