Court Opinion

ID: 9636124
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:17:11.808466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:42.523127
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The views of negligence stated in the opinion were, it seems to me, those the jury must have understood as controlling its deliberations. In the most prominent place in its careful and lengthy charge — at the very opening — the court stated clearly and forcefully the appropriate objective standard by which the master’s navigation should be tested. Again in the middle of the charge the court dealt rather extensively with the questions to be raised and answered as to the master’s conduct, showing decisively that it could not be his own subjective views of proper navigation which should govern. Finally at the end of the charge and when the inevitable colloquy with counsel as to their requests to charge began, the court reiterated this objective standard both in granting some of plaintiffs’ requests and in stating that it had covered others in its general charge. The incident relied on here for reversal came still later in that colloquy, which doubtless failed even to hold the jury’s attention, since the judge passed upon a total of 31 requests — 10 for plaintiffs, and 21 for defendant. The one in question was the 27th considered; the judge simply read it, plaintiffs’ counsel merely said, “I respectfully except,” repeating the formula he had already employed extensively, and then they passed on to the remaining four requests.
Now the only objection to the request— in itself appropriate and necessary to emphasize the importance of testing the navi*519gation in the light of conditions known or observed at the time of the accident, the evidence having shown the crest of the storm to be then already past — is the use of the word “his” before “judgment and skill.” But that, I think, cannot be held erroneous, but only ambiguous, with the ambiguity cleared up by the positive statements of the general charge. It is not erroneous, textually considered, because it is the master’s judgment which is in issue; error appears only when we add the gloss of interpreting “his” to include a subjective standard of negligence, not the objective standard previously defined. The judge, with his attention naturally focused upon the more important thought contained in the request as to time of applying the test, probably believed — as did the jury if it caught the point at all — that he was only saying in effect “his proper judgment according to the standard I have previously defined.” Note that had the statement as given followed immediately after his original definition, we must surely have so interpreted it and would not have been conscious of any inconsistency. It seems clear, too, that no one was at the time; had the matter been even mentioned, it would have been cleared up in an instant. And now plaintiffs are not entitled to assign it as error, since counsel failed to state “distinctly the matter to which he objects and the grounds of his objection.” Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, rule 51, 28 U.S.C.A. following section 723c.
This case was tried for twelve days over a period of 2-1/2 weeks, concluding with a verdict justified on the evidence. It was contested with bitterness, making the judge’s task far from easy; and we seem agreed, after a scrupulous scrutiny,1 that for the most part it was well conducted. This now all goes for naught because the judge inadvertently and inconspicuously used the wrong word — “his,” instead of “proper” — but with a connotation hardly to be misunderstood under all the circumstances. I would follow the admonition of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, rule 61, repeating 28 U.S.C.A. § 391 in substance, that a verdict is not to be set aside “unless refusal to take such action appears to the court inconsistent with substantial justice.”

 For my part I fear we overdignify the objection to the amendment of the answer by the attention we give it; the issue was so naturally, if not inevitably, a part of the case that no different course in the presentation of evidence was required or had, and there was obviously no basis even for a request for a continuance.