Court Opinion

ID: 9618336
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:11:03.340239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:28.755718
License: Public Domain

MADDEN, Judge
(dissenting).
I am unable to agree with the court’s decision. I recognize that the Severin and’ Stewart cases cited by the court fully support the decision. But I think that the decision in United States v. Blair, 321 U.S. 730, 737, 64 S.Ct. 820, 88 L.Ed. 1039, is, in effect,, ■contrary to our decisions in those cases, and lays down a better rule. In the Blair case-the court approved a judgment by this court in favor of a prime contractor, for losses suffered by a subcontractor because of erroneous requirements imposed by a Government inspector, which increased the subcontractor’s labor costs. The court said [321 U.S. 730, 64 S.Ct. 824] :
“The court below made no finding, and the subcontract as introduced in the record does not expressly indicate, that respondent was liable to the subcontractor for the acts of the Government on which the claim was. based.
“Clearly the subcontractor could not recover this claim in a suit against the United: States, for there was no express or implied., contract between him and the Government. Merritt v. United States, 267 U.S. 338, 45 S.Ct. 278, 69 L.Ed. 643. But it does not follow that respondent is barred from suing. for this amount. Respondent was the only person legally bound to perform his contract with the Government and he had the • undoubted right to recover from the Gov- • ernment the contract price for the tile, terrazzo, marble and soapstone work whether.*599that work was performed personally or through another. This necessarily implies the right to recover extra costs and services wrongfully demanded of respondent under the contract, regardless of whether such costs were incurred or such services were performed personally or through a subcontractor. Respondent’s contract with the Government is thus sufficient to sustain an action for extra costs wrongfully demanded under that contract. Hunt v. United States, 257 U.S. 125, 42 S.Ct. 5, 66 L. Ed. 163.”
This language and decision seem to me to leave nothing of our doctrine expressed in the Severin and Stewart cases. And although I wrote the court’s opinion in the Severin case, I should be glad to see it overruled, for, upon further consideration, I think it introduces to large an element of the accidental into our decisions in these frequently recurring cases involving subcontractors. I think that in most of the suits involving wrongs committed by Government agents to the harm of subcontractors, there would be no ground on which the prime contractor would, in fact, be liable to the subcontractor. Yet we consistently allow recovery in such cases, without first trying the hypothetical suit of the subcontractor against the prime contractor. We do not allow recovery because we presume the existence of such liability. Such a presumption would, I think, be contrary to the truth in most cases. In the Severin and Stewart cases we did not-allow recovery, not because the actual situation with reference to liability was different, but because the prime contractor had inserted in his subcontracts, supererogatorily, an express provision relieving him from liability for acts of the Government.
Our, distinction, then, depends upon the presence or absence of language in the subcontract which has no other practical utility than the wholly unforeseen one of making it impossible for a subcontractor to be compensated for wrongs suffered at the hands of the Government in the same circumstances in which other subcontractors, absent the language, are given relief. I therefore think that the distinction should be discarded, and the prime contractor treated in all cases as the owner of a right to have the Government comply with its contract, which right he holds in trust for those whom he brings into the situation by giving them interests in such compliance as subcontractors. Whether or not in his creation of this trust relation he expressly makes himself exempt from liability for violations by the Government of the contract should have no effect upon his right, as the owner of the rights under the contract, to enforce it for the benefit of those harmed by its breach.
I would overrule the Severin and Stewart cases and dismiss the Government’s motion to limit findings of fact.
HOWELL, Judge, concurs in the foregoing.