Court Opinion

ID: 9450899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:00:33.834578+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:29.476334
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur fully but would add these comments by way of emphasis.
The plight of the stevedore-employer caught in the Sieracki-Ryan-Yaka maelstrom is indeed an unhappy one undoubtedly deserving of congressional solicitude. But there is no indication that concern for him was behind the 1959 amendments or, if so, that Congress dispensed its grace by prescriptive-limitation largesse to strangers — the allegedly tortious third party ship or shipowner.
True, a 20% interest in the excess recovery was thrown out as bait, but a discerning stevedore-employer is no more likely to rise to this than to the beguiling lure of pre-1959 recoupment. In either case, he’s hooked. Strachan Shipping Co. v. Melvin, 5 Cir., 1964, 327 F.2d 83 (dissenting) .
And as to a supposed protection to the employer-stevedore or the tortious third party shipowner it is of no real value as a built-in sometime available, prescriptive limitation period. Except for death cases *304and in a few other rare injury situations cases under the Longshoremen’s Act are processed frequently without formal claim and almost invariably without a final formal award by the Deputy Commissioner. Atlantic & Gulf Stevedores, Inc. v. Donovan, 5 Cir., 1960, 274 F.2d 794, 800; 279 F.2d 75. Of course only a final award triggers the 6 month period. Consequently as to most cases the tor-tious third party remains vulnerable until the appropriate state-federal-local-maritime statute of limitations or laches cuts off the claim.
The 1959 amendment helps neither the distraught stevedore-employer or the harried third party in any predictable, meaningful, regular way. This eliminates all save the injured worker as the object of congressional concern. As to him, the purpose was to expand, not contract, his rights.