Court Opinion

ID: 9493649
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:13:59.109388+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:56.721418
License: Public Domain

POLLAK, District Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment of the court, and I join its opinion. I add a brief word to make a rather simple point.
The court finds that the Supreme Court’s opinion of eighty years ago, in Piedmont & George’s Creek Coal Co. v. Seaboard Fisheries Co., 254 U.S. 1, 41 *1367S.Ct. 1, 65 L.Ed. 97 (1920), remains the authoritative construction of the pertinent portion of the Federal Maritime Lien Act (FMLA). I agree. The Piedmont opinion was written by Justice Brandéis and the Supreme Court was unanimous. It would take a very strong showing that the Supreme Court has, in some subsequent case, undercut, or substantially limited, the Piedmont opinion, before any lower court could decline to follow it. But there is no evidence that the Supreme Court has weakened Piedmont. To the contrary, as the court today points out, the . Supreme Court, in 1940, had occasion to refer to Piedmont, and did so in, a way that evidenced Piedmont’s continuing vitality. In Dampskibsselskabet v. Signal Oil Co., 310 U.S. 268, 276-77, 60 S.Ct. 937, 84 L.Ed. 1197 (1940), Chief Justice Hughes, speaking for the unanimous Court, distinguished Piedmont from the case then before the Court; but the discussion of Piedmont manifested unhesitating acceptance of the principles Justice Brandéis had announced twenty years before.
The only real question before this court today is whether the language of Piedmont — which dealt with supplying coal in bulk to a company that used some, but not all, of the coal on its fishing vessels — has valid application to the case at bar, which involves the leasing of cargo containers to a shipping company under an agreement which, as the court aptly summarizes it, “provided that the leased containers would be used only on vessels owned and/or operated by [the shipping company] and would be used for oceanic transportation of goods and land transport in connection with the oceanic transportation.” Leasing cargo containers to a shipping company is not a unique, or even an unusual, transaction. As the court makes clear, essentially the same transaction has been considered, in the context of the FMLA, by four other courts of appeals, and all four were guided by Piedmont to the conclusion that no FMLA maritime lien had attached.
It may reasonably be asked whether the policy reasons that led the Piedmont Court to find, with respect to the somewhat clumsy transaction framed by the particular facts of that case, that there was no maritime lien — a lien- of a sort that the Court deemed “secret” and that “may operate to the prejudice of prior mortgagees or of purchasers without notice,” 254 U.S. at 12, 41 S.Ct. 1 — are of comparable force in the context of the apparently mature system of large-scale leasing of cargo containers illustrated by the' case at bar. But the answer to that question is not one that a court is likely to be in a position to make an informed judgment about on the basis of a record and briefs presented in litigation. It is the sort of question that members of Congress — after considering the testimony of those versed in shipping-industry practices and the operation of the relevant credit structures- — -would be better equipped to answer than judges are.
Pending congressional review of the pertinent portion of FMLA, the course of judicial prudence is . for this court — acknowledging that at least for the time being Piedmont provides doctrinal guidance — to align itself with the four courts of appeals that have already rejected the claim of a maritime lien in the context of leased cargo containers.