Court Opinion

ID: 9446732
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:17:05.258743+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:45.542156
License: Public Domain

WISDOM, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent.
With all due deference, I suggest that my distinguished brothers are rearing too grand an edifice from the few shards they found in their interlinear excavations in Hahn v. Ross Island Sand & Gravel,1 Davis v. Department of Labor,2 and Parker v. Motor Boat Sales.3
Davis was a structural steel worker. He was injured while dismantling a bridge. Hahn was an “oiler” employed on a dredge anchored to the shore. The dredge was used to scoop out sand and gravel from the bottom of a lagoon. *551Hahn was injured when he fell from a ladder attached to a hopper that was being transferred from one barge to another barge. I accept the assumption that the practicalities of certain situations may justify the illogic of twilight zones; at least to the extent I am forced to do so by the Supreme Court. Accepting such an assumption, I have no difficulty in recognizing that Davis and Hahn may be said to be in the twilight zone.
But not every amphibious worker is in the twilight zone. Nor has the Supreme Court said so in the Davis and Hahn decisions.4 There are still cases where a harbor worker is injured on navigable waters in employment that is maritime in nature; cases, therefore, when “recovery for the disability or death through workmen’s compensation proceedings may not validly be provided by state law”.5 Longshoring is traditionally maritime work — not twilight zone work. Noah was a longshoreman injured on navigable waters. Jensen was a longshoreman injured on navigable waters.6
I cannot read the Jensen case except as holding that state compensation laws cannot validly apply to longshoremen injured on water within admiralty jurisdiction. Like my brothers, I think that the decision is wrong. It seems to me that there is a sufficient tie between a state and its waterfront workers to say that the application of state compensation laws to longshoremen will not imperil the federal constitution and will not make enough of a dent in general maritime law to disrupt its prize symmetry and uniformity. But the Jensen case has never been overruled and it was quoted with approval in the Hahn case.
I respectfully submit that the majority opinion and the concurring opinion of Judge Hutcheson attach too much importance to the Hahn case. True, the Oregon Supreme Court thought that Hahn was not in the twilight zone; the United States Supreme Court thought otherwise. But the significance of the Hahn decision has nothing to do with an expanding twilight zone. The United States Supreme Court regarded as serious only the question whether a worker in the twilight zone could spurn federal compensation and bring a suit for personal injuries in a state court — under the language of the Oregon statute allowing an injured employee to bring a negligence suit for damages when an employer has rejected the act’s automatic compensation provisions. There is nothing in the Hahn case to inspire the court to look for new revelations on the breadth of the twilight zone — revelations from Davis v. Department of Labor or from Isaiah.
Congress adopted the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Act to provide federal compensation for longshore and harbor workers beyond the constitutional reach of the state. Passage of the Act was in itself congressional recognition that in Jensen and its progeny courts felt compelled to draw a line somewhere, beyond which states could not validly reach. The line may be shadowy. The twilight zone the line contains may be uncertain. The zone may stretch from embalmed darkness to the shadow of a *552shade. But if longshoremen are in the zone, there is so little left on the federal side of the line that courts should stop talking about a twilight zone and instead talk about concurrent federal-state jurisdiction in all compensation cases involving all amphibious workers.
I recognize and favor the policy considerations supporting the view that amphibious workers should have a choice between state and federal compensation. But if that is the law with respect to longshoremen injured on navigable waters, Jensen has melted down to the vanishing point. And with no comment from the Supreme Court or Congress.

. Hahn v. Ross Island Sand & Gravel, 358 U.S. 272, 79 S.Ct. 266, 3 L.Ed.2d 292. The facts are stated in Hahn v. Ross Island Sand and Gravel Co., Or., 320 P.2d 668.

. Davis v. Department of Labor, 1942, 317 U.S. 249, 63 S.Ct. 225, 87 L.Ed. 246.

. Parker v. Motor Boat Sales Co., 1941, 314 U.S. 244, 62 S.Ct. 221, 86 L.Ed. 184. In that case a salesman for a company selling motorboats and outboard motors was drowned while demonstrating an outboard motor to a prospective customer.

. In the Hahn ease the Supreme Court said [358 U.S. 272, 79 S.Ct. 207]: “In Davis v. Department of Labor & Industries, 317 U.S. 249, 63 S.Ct. 225, 87 L.Ed. 246, we recognized that in some cases it was impossible to predict in advance of trial whether a worker’s injury occurred in an operation which, although maritime in nature, was so ‘local’ as to allow state compensation laws validly to apply under the limitations of Southern P. Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 37 S.Ct. 524, 61 L.Ed. 1086, [L.R.A. 1918C, 451, Ann.Cas. 1917E, 900, 14 N.C. C.A. 597]. As to cases within this ‘twilight zone’, Davis, in effect, gave an injured waterfront employee an election to recover compensation under either the Longshoremen’s Act or the Workmen’s Compensation Law of the State in which the injury occurred.”

. § 3, 44 Stat. 1426, 33 U.S.C.A. § 903(a).

. Southern P. Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 37 S.Ct. 524, 61 L.Ed. 1086.