Court Opinion

ID: 9461315
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:11:17.799427+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:00.039302
License: Public Domain

ON PETITION FOR REHEARING
ALDRICH, Senior Circuit Judge.
Plaintiff has filed a petition for rehearing addressed to the propriety of our ruling that the jury verdict for the defendant on the unseaworthiness count rendered moot, or disposed of, plaintiff’s claim that he should have been permitted to go to the jury on the negligence count. *1324While we find the petition without merit, the brief in support is based upon a misconception it might be well to answer.
The district court in its charge defined as unseaworthiness all of the deficiencies asserted as resulting from defendant’s alleged negligence. Except for flirting with some manifestly-mistaken definitions of unseaworthiness 1 plaintiff “concedes that, as noted . by this Court, the theories of liability relied upon in the case at bar to establish both Jones Act negligence and' unseaworthiness under the general maritime law were the same.” His contention is not that we misidentified the bases of liability, but that we misunderstood “the distinction between causation in Jones Act negligence and causation in the general maritime remedy of unseaworthiness.” Plaintiff says that while “under Rogers, [Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. R. Co., 1957, 352 U.S. 500, 77 S.Ct. 443, 1. L.Ed.2d 493] causation would be established if the defendant’s negligence contributed, in whole or in part (even the slightest), to the Petitioner’s injuries,” it “seems clear that causation in an allegation of unseaworthiness requires causation in the common law sense or something very close thereto,” [Emphasis supplied] and consequently placed a higher burden upon him. We emphasize the waffling because plaintiff neither explains its meaning nor supports it; the heavy. burden of “causation in the common law sense” is supported by (and only by) Devitt & Blackrhar, Federal Jury Practice and Instructions, 2d ed. 1970, j[ 93.09. This is a misunderstanding of the law applicable to seamen.2
The reason why under the Jones Act the plaintiff is entitled to a charge that he need show only that defendant's negligence contributed to his injury was fully explained in Rogers. Basically it is because, as distinguished from the common law, where defendant’s negligence must be the “sole, efficient, producing cause” and plaintiff would be barred if his own negligence was a contributing cause, the Jones Act “expressly imposes liability upon the employer to pay damages for injury or death due ‘in whole or in part’ to its negligence.” See 352 U.S. at 505-507, 77 S.Ct. at 449. But so does the law of unseaworthiness. Pope & Talbot, Inc. v. Hawn, 1953, 346 U.S. 406, 74 S.Ct. 202, 98 L.Ed. 143. This does not mean, in either instance, that defendant’s fault must not be shown to be a cause — there must, of course, be a connection — it merely need not be the cause. The distinction was well brought out in Farnarjian v. American Export Isbrandtsen Lines, Inc., 2 Cir., 1973, 474 F.2d 361, at 364.
We note, in conclusion, that the district court properly charged the jury in exactly this sense.3
Petition denied.

. B. g., Lunsford v. Halcyon S.S. Co., E.D. Pa., 1973, 354 F.Supp. 573, 577.

. We have frequently expressed, our apprehensions with respect to general compilations of jury instructions. See, e. g., McMillen v. United States, 1 Cir., 1967, 386 F.2d 29, at 32. They are dangerous because no authors, however erudite, can have a comprehensive substantive background in all fields. In jf 93.-05 of Devitt & Blackmar there is a suggested special interrogatory, supposedly, (but, on investigation not), supported by authority, that would be jettisoned by any admiralty lawyer. Our objection to these compilations is that they may lull unsuspecting judges into not doing their homework.

. In speaking of “a proximate causal connection between the unseaworthiness and the injury,” [emphasis ours] the court gave a single, and very clear, example — an unsea-worthy “slippery top deck, but the plaintiff fell in the engine room.” We might suggest that the legalese “proximate” is a word not too helpful to a lay jury, and might well be avoided altogether, but it can do no harm so long as the meaning appropriate to the case is articulated. [Where, as in the case at bar, the charge includes an instruction to reduce the verdict by the proportion,] if any, that plaintiff’s negligence contributed, the articulation is apparent.