Court Opinion

ID: 9419297
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:32.310488+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.286049
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring:
The phrase “assumption of risk” is an excellent illustration of the extent to which uncritical use of words bedevils the law. 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. Thus, in the setting of one set of circumstances, “assump*69tion of risk” has been used as a shorthand way of saying that although an employer may have violated the duty of care which he owed his employee, he could nevertheless escape liability for damages resulting from his negligence if the employee, by accepting or continuing in the employment with “notice” of such negligence, “assumed the risk.” In such situations “assumption of risk” is a defense which enables a negligent employer to defeat recovery against him. In the setting of a totally different set of circumstances, “assumption of risk” has a totally different meaning. Industrial enterprise entails, for all those engaged in it, certain hazards to life and limb which no amount of care on the part of the employer can avoid. In denying recovery to an employee injured as a result of exposure to such a hazard, where the employer has in no sense been negligent or derelict in the duty owed to his employees, courts have often said that the employee “assumed the risk.” Here the phrase “assumption of risk” is used simply to convey the idea that the employer was not at fault and therefore not liable.
Plainly enough only mischief could result from using a single phrase to express two such different ideas. Such ambiguity necessarily does harm to the desirability of clarity and coherence in any civilized system of law. But the greater mischief was that in one of its aspects the phrase “assumption of risk” gave judicial expression to a social policy that entailed much human misery. The notion of “assumption of risk” as a defense — that is, where the employer concededly failed in his duty of care and nevertheless escaped liability because the employee had “agreed” to “assume the risk” of the employer’s fault — rested, in the context of our industrial society, upon a pure fiction. And in all English-speaking countries legislation was necessary to correct this injustice. In enforcing such legislation the courts should not lose sight of the ambiguous nature of the doctrine with which the *70legislation dealt. In giving effect to the legislative policy, care must be taken lest such ambiguity perpetuate the old mischief against which the new legislation was directed.
Our present concern is with the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. Prior to 1939, the only inroad made by the Act upon the doctrine of “assumption of risk” as a defense to liability arising from negligence was that in any action brought by an employee, he “shall not be held to have assumed the risks of his employment in any case where the violation by said common carrier of any statute enacted for the safety of employees contributed to the injury or death of such employee.” Section 4 of the Act as amended April 22, 1908, c. 149, 35 Stat. 65. The provision was construed, naturally enough, to mean that “the assumption of risk as a defense is abolished only where the negligence of the carrier is in violation of some statute enacted for the safety of employees. In other cases, therefore, it is retained.” Jacobs v. Southern Ry. Co., 241 U. S. 229, 235. By only partially withdrawing the defense of “assumption of risk,” Congress enabled the railroads to avoid liability in many situations where the employee’s injury resulted from the negligence of the carrier in the only way in which an employer can be negligent, namely, through the negligence of its servants. In other words, Congress continued to sanction the fiction of attributing to employees a willingness to bear the consequences of the carrier’s negligence, other than that arising from its violation of a statute enacted for the safety of employees.
This was the unfortunate situation which the 1939 amendment, the Act of August 11, 1939, c. 685, 53 Stat. 1404, sought to remedy. To § 4 was added the provision that in any action brought by an employee he “shall not be held to have assumed the risks of his employment in any case where such injury or death resulted in whole or in part from the negligence of any of the officers, agents, *71or employees of such carrier. . . .” The effect of this provision is to make it clear that, whatever other risks an employee may assume, he does not “assume the risk” of the negligence of the carrier or its other employees. Once the negligence of the carrier is established, it cannot be relieved of liability by pleading that the employee “assumed the risk.”
But the 1939 amendment left intact the foundation of the carrier’s liability — negligence. Unlike the English enactment which, nearly fifty years ago, recognized that the common law concept of liability for negligence is archaic and unjust as a means of compensation for injuries sustained by employees under modern industrial conditions, the federal legislation has retained negligence as the basis of a carrier’s liability. For reasons that are its concern and not ours, Congress chose not to follow the example of most states in establishing systems of workmen’s compensation not based upon negligence. Congress has to some extent alleviated the doctrines of the law of negligence as applied to railroad employees. By specific provisions in the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, it has swept away “assumption of risk” as a defense once negligence is established. But it has left undisturbed the other meaning of “assumption of risk,” namely, that an employee injured as a consequence of being exposed to a risk which the employer in the exercise of due care could not avoid is not entitled to recover, since the employer was not negligent.
The point is illustrated by two opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes. In Schlemmer v. Buffalo, R. & P. Ry. Co., 205 U. S. 1, 12-13, he called attention to the danger of relieving from liability for negligence by talking about “assumption of risk” — a danger resulting from the ambiguity of the phrase. “Assumption of risk” by an employee may be a way of expressing the conclusion that he has been guilty of contributory negligence. But an employee can*72not be charged with contributory negligence simply because he “assumed the risk”; the inquiry is, did his conduct depart from that of a reasonably prudent employee in his situation? As Mr. Justice Holmes admonished us in the Schlemmer case, “unless great care be taken, the servant’s rights will be sacrificed by simply charging him with assumption of the risk under another name.” Ibid. That case was decided before the Federal Employers’ Liability Act was in force. In a later case arising under the Act, Chesapeake & Ohio Ry. Co. v. Nixon, 271 U. S. 218, Mr. Justice Holmes for a unanimous Court reversed a judgment for the plaintiff on the ground that the employee’s death was caused by a failure to keep a lookout which was one of the “usual risks” of his employment. To be sure, this decision was made prior to the 1939 amendment, but in this respect that enactment makes no change in the law. The basis of an action under the Act remains the carrier’s negligence. The carrier is not to be relieved from the consequences of its negligence by any claim that the employee “assumed the risk” of its negligence. But neither is the carrier to be charged with those injuries which result from the “usual risks” incident to employment on railroads — risks which cannot be eliminated through the carrier’s exercise of reasonable care.
“Assumption of risk” as a defense where there is negligence has been written out of the Act. But “assumption of risk,” in the sense that the employer is not liable for those risks which it could not avoid in the observance of its duty of care, has not been written out of the law. Because of its ambiguity the phrase “assumption of risk” is a hazardous legal tool. As a means of instructing a jury, it is bound to create confusion. It should therefore be discarded. But until Congress chooses to abandon the concept of negligence, upon which the Act now rests, in favor of a system of workmen’s compensation not dependent upon negligence, the courts cannot discard the *73principle expressed, in one of its senses, by the phrase “assumption of risk,” namely, that a carrier is not liable unless it was negligent.
Perhaps no field of the law comes closer to the lives of so many families in this country than does the law of negligence, imbedded as it is in the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. It is most desirable, therefore, that the law should not be cloudy and confused. I am not at all certain that the Circuit Court of Appeals misconceived the nature and extent of the carrier’s liability after the 1939 amendment, rather than merely obscured its understanding by beclouding talk about “assumption of risk.” But since I agree that the District Court should have allowed the case to go to the jury on the issue of negligence, I concur in the decision.