Court Opinion

ID: 9473120
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:19:39.079187+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:19.680368
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join in the opinion, but would add the following:
The Supreme Court has in recent years made quite a point of always giving federal statutes their literal interpretation as written, absent special factors such as reaching an absurd result, associated with pretty plain indications that Congress intended something different and of lesser scope. Such well known cases have so held as Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153, 187 n. 33, 98 S.Ct. 2279, 2298 n. 33, 57 L.Ed.2d 117 (1978) (the snail darter case); Griffin v. Oceanic Contractors, Inc., 458 U.S. 564, 102 S.Ct. 3245, 73 L.Ed.2d 973 (1982). The instant case made me -uneasy because it was not made plain at first why “direct action” did not mean any and every “direct action” in which the insurer was duly named as a defendant. This court says this would appear to be the result “at first glance.” The reported cases seem to pass over rather lightly why this is not so on second and subsequent glances. I think perhaps they took it for granted and were not yet warned by the Supreme Court not to rewrite or vary statutory language whenever it seemed good to them to do so.
The answer here is that from the beginning of § 1332(c) “direct action” was on the order of a term of art, not of one in common speech. It meant the right, given then by but two states, for motor vehicle tort plaintiffs to skip suing the tort feasor and sue directly his insurance carrier. Such appears in the legislative history. Senate Rep. No. 1308, 88th Cong., 2d Sess. (1964), reprinted in 1964 U.S.Code Cong. & Ad. News 2778. It calls such a statute a “direct action” statute, the words “direct action” in quotes at 2778. It refers to the two states as states which have “direct action” statutes. There is a detailed analysis of the spectacular effect of the Louisi*1579ana “direct action” statute upon the case load of the federal district courts in that state. The report ends with letters by Warren Olney and Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach, describing the bill as doing no more than eliminating from diversity jurisdiction suits on certain tort claims in which both parties are local residents but which, because of a state “direct action” statute, may be brought directly against a foreign insurance carrier.
This is the kind of thing I think the Supreme Court would accept as justifying a departure from its rule of strict and literal statutory construction.
To buttress further my belief that “direct action” and “direct action statutes” are, semantically, terms of art that refer not to any statute authorizing suit against an insurance company, but only the special kind of which Louisiana and Wisconsin furnished the first examples, I refer to 12 Couch on Insurance 2d § 45:775 & ff (1964) where such statutes are described and right away in § 45:776 the writer starts calling them “direct action statutes.” See also id, 1980 Supplement, § 45:777 telling one that a direct action statute is not to be used to get an insurer into federal court when both the plaintiff and the insured are residents of the same state.