Court Opinion

ID: 9420048
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:42.221245+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.001815
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Douglas,
with whom Mr. Justice Black and Mr. Justice Murphy concur, dissenting.
For the reasons stated in my separate opinion in Hust v. Moore-McCormack Lines, 328 U. S. 707, 734, I think that respondents were owners pro hac vice of the vessel, since the business of managing and operating it was their business. They were, therefore, principals and liable to petitioner, a longshoreman who was injured while working on the deck of the vessel by reason of the breaking of a cargo boom, part of the ship’s gear.
The Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reached the same result in a case decided since Hust v. Moore-McCormack Lines. In Militano v. United States, 156 F. 2d 599, that court held that the agent under the same form of operating agreement as we have here was owner pro hac vice. Swan, J., speaking for the court, said in reference to the Hust case, p. 602, “If the agent remains the employer sufficiently to be liable to members of the crew under the Jones Act, we think it cannot escape the duties of an owner pro hac vice in other respects. Thus it has the duty to furnish stevedores with a safe place to work, a duty which is analogous to that owed by a landowner to a business visitor.”
*161The Court does not essay to answer that argument; nor does it address itself to the facts which I reviewed in the Hust case and which establish that the business of managing and operating the vessel was the business of the agent. It avoids analysis of the actual arrangement by viewing with alarm the consequences to the Government of such a holding as applied in other situations. But we are here concerned with private rights which press for recognition. It is no answer to the legal argument on which those private rights rest that the Government might' be inconvenienced if they were recognized. It is plain under this operating agreement that the United States is merely the underwriter of the financial risks of the venture while the private operator performs the managerial functions in the usual way. To call that government operation is to ignore the realities of the relationship. Whatever the consequences in other situations, it is shocking to find private operators getting immunity in this manner from their traditional liability for tort claims.