Court Opinion

ID: 9478257
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:44:13.860242+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:19.466730
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Were it not for the statutory gloss provided by decisions such as Posey, Johan-sen, and Flippo, I doubt that it would occur to many people, on simply reading the pertinent statutes, that Congress did not intend the Tennessee Valley Authority to be subject to suit under the Jones Act for negligently causing the death of a crew member of a TVA vessel.
When Congress passed the Jones Act in 1920, it authorized the bringing of an action for damages in respect of the death of “any” seaman. 46 U.S.C. App. § 688. Because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, the United States itself was not subject to suit under the Jones Act; but when, in 1933, Congress created TVA as a separate body corporate, Congress gave the new corporation only limited immunity from suit. From the very first day of its existence, TVA has been subject to suit in its corporate name, just as a private corporation would be, except as otherwise “specifically” provided in the TVA Act (see 16 U.S.C. § 831c(b)) and except as otherwise provided in subsequently enacted legislation. Nowhere in the TVA Act has Congress “specifically” provided that TVA should be immune from suit under the Jones Act — and the only subsequent enactment that is pertinent points in precisely the opposite direction.
“[I]nsofar as applicable,” the TVA Act of 1933 extended the “benefits” of the Federal Employees Compensation Act of 1916 to persons given employment under the provisions of the 1933 Act. 16 U.S.C. § 831b. Whether a prohibition against suing under the Jones Act was originally perceived as one of the “benefits” thereby bestowed *417upon TVA employees appears doubtful for several reasons. Not until 1949, for one thing, did Congress expressly state that the liability of the United States and its instrumentalities under the FECA should be “exclusive” — and when Congress added the exclusivity provision, which is now codified at 5 U.S.C. § 8116(c), it expressly excepted persons in the position of plaintiffs decedent. The exception is no less applicable to TVA than the general exclusivity provision itself.
The language of the post-1949 version of the FECA, as I read it, does not demonstrate a Congressional intent that the remedies provided under the FECA are to be “exclusive and instead of all other liability” insofar as claims involving masters or crewmembers of vessels are concerned. Although the first sentence of 5 U.S.C. § 8116(e) says that the liability of the United States or an instrumentality thereof under the FECA is exclusive, the second sentence, as quoted in footnote 2 of the majority opinion, provides as follows: “However, this subsection does not apply to a master or a member of a crew of a vessel.”
Plaintiffs decedent, Farrell W. Turner, was unquestionably “a member of a crew of a vessel.” If that vessel had been owned and operated by a private corporation, the corporation would unquestionably have been subject to suit under the Jones Act on account of Mr. Turner’s death. Congress having launched TVA into the commercial world with a “sue-and-be-sued” clause in its charter, just as Congress was to make the Postal Service a “sue-and-be-sued” entity a generation later, I should have thought, based on the plain words of the pertinent statutes, that TVA would be no less amenable to suit under a statute such as the Jones Act than the Postal Service or any private corporation would be. See Franchise Tax Board of California v. U.S.P.S., 467 U.S. 512, 104 S.Ct. 2549, 81 L.Ed.2d 446 (1984), where, as noted in Loeffler v. Frank, — U.S. -, -, 108 S.Ct. 1965, 1970, 100 L.Ed.2d 549 (1988), “the Court held that the sue-and-be-sued clause must be liberally construed and that the Postal Service’s liability must be presumed to be the same as that of any other business.”
In Posey v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 93 F.2d 726 (5th Cir.1937), however, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided that because a TVA employee who was injured on the job could seek redress from the corporation under the FECA, he could not sue the corporation under state law. And in Flippo v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 486 F.2d 612 (5th Cir.1973) — a case decided after Congress had made the “benefits” of the FECA “exclusive” for all TVA employees except masters and crewmembers of vessels — the same circuit held that an injured TVA seaman could not sue TVA under maritime law.
In announcing its conclusion in Flippo, the Fifth Circuit confessed to “a certain bewilderment” as to how 5 U.S.C. § 8116(c) could be read as cutting off substantial maritime law rights that seemed to be expressly reserved by the plain language of the statutory proviso declaring that the exclusivity subsection of the FECA “does not apply to a master or a member of a crew of a vessel.” Flippo, 486 F.2d at 612. And the able district judge whose decision is now before us on appeal made a similar confession; in denying plaintiff’s motion to reconsider dismissal of the Jones Act claim, Chief Judge Thomas A. Wiseman, Jr., said that the points urged by plaintiff “have logical force and might have carried the day had they been made in the late 1930s, before Posey and progeny had become settled law.” Judge Wiseman went on to say that “[pjerhaps an appellate court will undertake to reexamine the settled precedents at issue; this Court feels itself bound.”
Our court is not bound by decisions of other courts of appeals, of course, and unless reexamination of the Posey/Flippo doctrine is precluded by Supreme Court or Sixth Circuit precedent, I would be inclined to undertake it.
There appears to be no Sixth Circuit decision in point. The only Supreme Court cases I know of that might rule out the reexamination suggested by Judge Wise-*418man are Johansen v. United. States, 343 U.S. 427, 72 S.Ct. 849, 96 L.Ed. 1051 (1952), and its progeny, including Patterson v. United States, 359 U.S. 495, 79 S.Ct. 936, 3 L.Ed.2d 971 (1959), and United States v. Demko, 385 U.S. 149, 87 S.Ct. 382, 17 L.Ed.2d 258 (1966) — and none of these cases holds that the “member of a crew of a vessel” exception to the exclusivity provision of the FECA does not mean what it appears to say with respect to employees of sue-and-be-sued government corporations such as TVA.
Johansen itself was a suit directly against the United States, not a suit against a separate corporate instrumentality. I may not fully have grasped the reasoning on which the Johansen decision rests — reasoning that Mr. Justice Black, speaking for four dissenting members of the Court, characterized as “unique” — but my understanding of Johansen’s rationale is this:
—The Federal Employees Compensation Act of 1916 was the first general statute in which the United States put aside the shield of sovereign immunity that had theretofore protected the United States from personal injury claims;
—Subsequent general statutes that also waived the sovereign immunity of the United States (the Public Vessels Act of 1925, e.g.) “were not usually directed toward cases where the United States had already put aside its sovereign armor, granting relief in other forms.” 343 U.S. at 431 [72 S.Ct. at 853].
—The remedy provided under the FECA was thus the exclusive remedy, usually, even before the 1949 amendments made this explicit. The exception for seamen therefore had no practical effect whatever — at least in the absence of “specific legislation” giving seamen a remedy beyond that made available under the FECA. 343 U.S. at 440-441 [72 S.Ct. at 857-58],
The plaintiffs in Johansen and the Supreme Court cases that followed it could point to no “specific legislation” giving them any remedy beyond that provided by the FECA. The plaintiff in the case at bar, however, is in quite a different position. She is not relying upon a general waiver of sovereign immunity for the United States itself or for a federal instrumentality that was already in existence when the FECA was passed in 1916. She relies, rather, upon a 1933 statute that created a brand new government corporation and, eo in-stante, declared that the new corporation should be subject to suit across the board— under the Jones Act, the Federal Employers Liability Act, the common law, or whatever — except as “specifically” provided in the Act itself. If words have meaning, nothing in the TVA Act “specifically” exempted the new corporation from suit under the Jones Act. And nothing in the 1933 version of the FECA specifically said that the FECA remedy was exclusive.
The 1949 amendments to the FECA did have the effect of exempting TVA from suit under statutes such as the Federal Employers Liability Act. That was a perfectly reasonable change for Congress to make, no doubt; for as the Supreme Court was to note in Johansen and repeat in Patterson, “[t]here is no reason to have two systems of redress.” 343 U.S. at 439, 72 S.Ct. at 856; 359 U.S. at 496, 79 S.Ct. at 937. But Congress having chosen to pass a statute that plainly perpetuated two systems of redress for seamen and masters employed by TVA, we have no right to set the statute aside or simply ignore it.
I labor under no illusions as to the likelihood of Johansen being overruled. Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 135, 71 S.Ct. 153, 95 L.Ed. 152 (1950), a somewhat comparable decision handed down in the same era as Johansen, was reconsidered two years ago in United States v. Johnson, 481 U.S. 681, 107 S.Ct. 2063, 95 L.Ed.2d 648, (1987), and a majority of the Court concluded then that the Feres doctrine should not be modified. That message seems clear *419enough. But the Supreme Court has never decided the issue presented in the case now before us, and I believe that the logic of the Court’s very recent decision in Loeffler supports the view that TVA (as distinguished from the United States itself) ought to be held subject to suit under the Jones Act. It is hard for me to understand, frankly, how fidelity to the text of the statutes could admit of any other result.