Court Opinion

ID: 9428295
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:22.517534+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:12.723938
License: Public Domain

Justice Powell,
with whom Justice Rehnquist joins, concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion because I agree with its basic thrust — placing the primary burden on the stevedore for avoiding injuries caused by obvious hazards. I write only to emphasize the distinction between this approach and the general “reasonableness” standard adopted by the Ninth Circuit in this case.
Under the Court’s opinion, “the shipowner has no general duty by way of supervision or inspection to exercise reasonable care to discover dangerous conditions that develop within the confines of the cargo operations that are assigned to the stevedore.” Ante, at 172. In addition, the opinion makes clear that the shipowner has only a limited duty with respect to obvious hazards of which it is aware. Although the shipowner cannot rely in all cases on the judgment and primary responsibility of the stevedore concerning what conditions allow safe work to continue, safety is a “matter of judgment committed to the stevedore in the first instance.” Ante, at 175. Only where the judgment of the stevedore is “obviously improvident,” ibid., and this poor judgment either is known to the shipowner or reasonably should be anticipated under the circumstances, does the shipowner have a duty to intervene.1 As the opinion points out, the customs and regulations allocating responsibility for particular repairs are highly relevant to this inquiry.
*181The difficulty with a more general reasonableness standard like that adopted by the court below is that it fails to deal with the problems of allocating responsibility between the stevedore and the shipowner. It may be that it is “reasonable” for a shipowner to rely on the stevedore to discover and avoid most obvious hazards. But when, in a suit by a longshoreman, a jury is presented with the single question whether it was “reasonable” for the shipowner to fail to take action concerning a particular obvious hazard, the jury will be quite likely to find liability. If such an outcome were to become the norm, negligent stevedores would be receiving windfall recoveries in the form of reimbursement for the statutory benefit payments made to the injured longshoremen.2 This would decrease significantly the incentives toward safety of the party in the best position to prevent injuries, and undercut the primary responsibility of that party for ensuring safety.

 In my view, the Restatement standard adopted by the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Circuits, see ante, at 162, n. 9, and discussed most recently in Evans v. S.S. “Campeche,” 639 F. 2d 848 (CA2 1981), is consistent with the plain intent of Congress to impose the primary responsibility on the stevedore. Although it is unnecessary in this case for the Court to adopt this standard fully, I do not understand our opinion to be inconsistent with it.

 Under 33 U. S. C. § 905 (b), the shipowner is liable in damages to the longshoreman if it was negligent, and it may not seek to recover any part of this liability from the stevedore. The longshoreman’s recovery is not reduced to reflect the negligence of the stevedore. Edmonds v. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, 443 U. S. 256 (1979). Under 33 U. S. C. § 933, the stevedore — even if concurrently negligent — receives reimbursement for its statutory benefit payments to the longshoreman, up to the full amount of those payments. See also Bloomer v. Liberty Mutual Ins. Co., 445 U. S. 74 (1980) (stevedore’s lien is not reduced by its proportional share of the costs of litigating the negligence suit). As a result of this automatic reimbursement, there is a danger that “concurrently negligent stevedores will be insulated from the obligation to pay statutory workmen’s compensation benefits, and thus will have inadequate incentives to provide a safe working environment for their employees.” Edmonds, supra, at 274 (BlackmttN, J., dissenting). In cases involving obvious and avoidable hazards, this danger will be realized unless the shipowner’s liability is limited to the unusual case in which it should be anticipated that the stevedore will fail to act reasonably. Any more stringent, or less defined, rule of shipowner liability will skew the statutory scheme in .a way Congress could not have intended. Cf. Canizzo v. Farrell Lines, Inc., 579 F. 2d 682, 687-688 (CA2 1978) (Friendly, J., dissenting).