Court Opinion

ID: 9422532
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:03:09.220026+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:37.479235
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
dissenting.
Heartrending as the petitioner’s accident has turned out to be, I think this case should not have been brought here. It involves no unsettled questions of federal law calling for decision by this Court, nor, in any acceptable sense, a departure by the state courts from legal principles already decided requiring this Court’s intervention. The case thus does not qualify for review under Rule 19.* See the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Frankfurter in Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 352 U. S. 500, 524, and the separate opinion of this writer, p. 559. The case has *123necessarily required an inordinate amount of time, which the Court can ill afford in the present state of its docket.
Reaching the merits, however, id., pp. 559-562,1 would affirm the judgment below. I agree with my Brothers Stewart and Goldberg as to the inconsistency of the jury’s verdict. But in addition, I cannot say that the view of the record taken by the state courts, in holding that the evidence on the issue of causation was insufficient to make a case for the jury, was an arbitrary or unreasonable one. The opinion of the Ohio Court of Appeals evinces a conscientious effort to follow this Court’s decisions under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, and more particularly the broad pronouncements made in the Rogers case, supra. On this score the Court’s reversal seems to me no more than an exercise in second-guessing the state court’s estimate of the record.
From another standpoint this case does have significance. It affords a particularly dramatic example of the inadequacy of ordinary negligence law to meet the social obligations of modern industrial society. The cure for that, however, lies with the legislature and not with the courts.

In pertinent part, Rule 19 provides:
“1. A review on writ of certiorari is not a matter of right, but of sound judicial discretion, and will be granted only where there are special and important reasons therefor. The following, while neither controlling nor fully measuring the court’s discretion, indicate the character of reasons which will be considered:
“(a) Where a state court has decided a federal question of substance not theretofore determined by this court, or has decided it in a way probably not in accord with applicable decisions of this court. . .