Court Opinion

ID: 9651114
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:07:30.94315+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:30.187013
License: Public Domain

HOUGH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting). If plaintiff had brought suit in the courts of the state where his cause of action arose, he would have been defeated, even though he sued under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. Casey v. Boston & Maine R. R. Co., 231 Mass. 529, 121 N. E. 403.
The reason for such defeat would have been that defendant’s employees, by violating the rule referred to, had been guilty of no negligence in respect of this plaintiff, and negligence of the defendant is by the act a prerequisite for recovery.
But negligence, though such prerequisite, is not defined by the act. Therefore by every canon of construction the statute must mean common-law negligence, and it has been often said that the United States has no common law.
The majority opinion is a very good example of the process of building up what may fairly be called a common law for the United States courts; i. e., a kind of federal interpretation of some common legal word, which is or may be at variance with the meaning of that word as accepted by the state courts.
Some legal difficulties or contradictions cannot he avoided under our dual system of government, but it is surely the duty of all courts to minimize rather than magnify them. Under the rule announced by the majority, the United States District Court sitting in Massachusetts must reject the Massachusetts rule because it is not in harmony with.the decisions of United States .courts sitting in other states, on which point it may be noted that all the federal decisions cited were made in supposed harmony with the law of the state where the cause of action arose.
So it seems to me that the rule evolved from them is unwarranted, nor can I perceive that Pryor v. Williams, 254 U. S. 43, 41 S. Ct. 36, 65 L. Ed. 120, has any application, for it relates to assumption of risk, a phrase which by the very statute giving rise to the cause of action is differentiated from contributory negligence, and it was for a refusal to submit to that differentiation that the decision below was reversed.
This ease is a simple illustration of how judges must make law, because in respect of the violation of certain kinds of rules negligence means one thing in Massachusetts and another in most of the rest of the country. We must decide whether it is better for the community to make negligence mean one thing in the state courts of Massachusetts and another thing in the United States courts sitting in the same state, or to let the unfortunate difference of meaning affect both state and federal courts geographically. To my mind the latter course is better for the common weal, and we preferred it in Boston & Maine R. R. Co. v. Daniel, 290 F. 916, a decision reached after much reflection, and now in substance overruled, though formally differentiated, in itself an unfortunate result.
Both on reason and what has hitherto been authority, I dissent.