Court Opinion

ID: 9444889
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:15:29.048507+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:03.455223
License: Public Domain

FRANK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Here we engage in interpreting a federal remedial statute, 46 U.S.C.A. § 745, enacted to benefit seamen. My colleagues reject any but a strictly literal interpretation.
The New York state court suit was dismissed on March 28,1949. Under the New York practice (cited by my colleagues), libellant had a year (i. e., until March, 1950) within which to move to restore that suit to the calendar. Nine months of that year still remained when the Supreme Court decided McAllister, 337 U.S. 783, 69 S.Ct. 1317, 93 L.Ed. 1692. I think no one doubts that, if within these nine months, libellant had moved the New York court (a) to reinstate the state-court suit and then (b) to dismiss it, on account of McAllister, that court would have granted the motion. My colleagues, if I understand them correctly, agree that, had that been done, the instant case would have been timely begun as within 46 U.S.C.A. § 745. They hold it untimely solely because libellant did not follow an empty ceremony (i. e., reinstating the state-court suit and then having it dismissed). I had thought that our court, long taught by Judge Learned Hand, would never be the slave of literal language, would always recognize that it is “one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary.”1 That is ancient learning.2 (Indeed, an early seventeenth-century English commentator suggested the removal of a judge, for violation of his oath of office, if he “held himself in his judgments precisely or rather austerely to the letter of the Iawe” without regard to its spirit.3 Of course, I think that suggestion inapplicable here.) To exalt the literal meaning at the expense of the purpose of a statute is especially surprising when, as here, the legislature aimed to help seamen, traditionally the wards of admiralty. See, e.g., Wilder v. Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co., 211 U.S. 239, 29 S.Ct. 58, 53 L.Ed. 164.

. Cabell v. Markham, 2 Cir., 148 F.2d 737, 739.

. For early expressions of that attitude, see United States v. Lennox Metal Manufacturing Co., 2 Cir., 225 F.2d 302, 311.

. Hake, Epieikia (Yale Law Library Publications, 1953) 29.