Court Opinion

ID: 9489649
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:20:32.200813+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:38.354051
License: Public Domain

SELYA, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
Under existing Supreme Court precedent, this is a close and a vexing case. A large part of the problem is that the Court’s language in Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. v. Pfeifer, 462 U.S. 523, 530-32 & n. 6, 103 S.Ct. 2541, 2547-48 & n. 6, 76 L.Ed.2d 768 (1983)—whether deemed a holding or a considered dictum — forces judges who are called upon to decide “dual capacity” LHWCA cases to engage in a legal fiction, pretending that a single entity (the injured person’s employer) is really two distinct and separable entities (employer and vessel owner pro hoc vice). In my view, this self-induced schizophrenia muddles the law and disrupts the delicate balance that Congress labored to strike between the entitlement of stevedores and others similarly situated to workers’ compensation benefits, and the entitlement of employers who provide that coverage to immunity from negligence suits. In short, I believe that Congress should have been taken literally when it wrote that an employer’s responsibility to furnish workers’ compensation benefits under the LHWCA is “exclusive and in place of all other liability of such employer to the employee.” 33 U.S.C. § 905(a).
This reasoning leads me to conclude, with all respect, either that Congress inadvertently muddied the waters in phrasing LHWCA § 905(b), or, alternatively, that Jones & Laughlin was wrongly decided. Still, I recognize that the Supreme Court’s opinion is binding on this court, and that we therefore must undertake what Judge Campbell charitably terms “an elusive quest.” Ante at note 11. Once reconciled to that necessity, I can in good conscience join this court’s cogent opinion. I write separately, however, to urge the Supreme Court and Congress to reflect upon the mind games that Jones & Laugh-lin — particularly as applied to harbor workers — compels us to play, and, hopefully, to revisit the question of whether “dual capacity” employers should be liable at all in negligence actions brought by their employees.