Court Opinion

ID: 8589405
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-23 15:43:31.180681+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:54:19.939632
License: Public Domain

Madden, Judge,
dissenting:
I agree that the plaintiff should recover. The determining fact, in my view, is that the pile was driven with the concurrence of both parties. If, in view of the probing that had been done, the driving of the pile was not a careless act, then the plaintiff was not careless, and the loss was due to an accident. If, on the other hand, it was careless conduct to drive the pile where it was driven, the Government, through its Assistant Superintendent of Construction, joined in the conduct, and could not have sued the plaintiff for the consequences of that conduct. At that point, then, the loss lay on the Government. When it ordered the plaintiff to repair the damage, it ordered it to do something which the *778plaintiff was under no duty to do. The Government should, therefore, pay for the doing of it.
It is urged that the contracting officer’s decision adverse to the plaintiff prevents any recovery here, under Article 15 of the contract. The issues between the parties should have been whether the plaintiff’s breaking of the Government’s water pipe was negligent, i. e., tortious and, if so, whether the concurrence of the Government’s agent in the plaintiff’s conduct was such as to prevent the Government from recovering its loss from the plaintiff. These issues, in a trial, might be left to a jury, but only after the jury had been carefully instructed by a judge as to the standards of conduct required by the law before it imposed a liability or sanctioned a defense. There is no indication in the record that the contracting officer ever thought of these issues, or was competent to resolve them if he had thought of them. Instead he read the contract literally, concluded that it required the plaintiff to keep the water running through the pipe, and therefore decided that the plaintiff had not done more than was required of it by the contract when it repaired the break in the pipe. It is said that he applied himself earnestly and diligently to the resolution of the dispute, but that hardly makes up for the fact that he did not know what the issue was.
I agree that this is not a “dispute concerning a question arising under this contract” within the meaning of article 15. The contract provision concerning the maintenance of the water service had nothing to do with the question. Only the fact that the plaintiff, when it broke the Government’s pipe, was engaged in the performance of a contract, created any appearance of a relation between the breaking and the contract. To so interpret article 15 as to encompass this dispute seems to me to stretch it beyond its expressed intent, and far beyond any actual intent which could reasonably be imputed to the contracting parties. It is orthodox doctrine that arbitrators may make decisions only within the authority granted them in the agreement to arbitrate, and that the question whether a subject matter is within their authority is not for the arbitrators to decide, but for the court, even though the arbitration agreement purports to cover “all disputes.” *779B. Fernandez and Hnos., S. en C., v. Rickert Rice Mills, Inc., 119 F. (2d) 809, 1 Cir.; 136 A. L. R. 351, with annotation on the construction of arbitration contracts; Williston on Contracts, § 1929. Where, as in Government contracts, the nonjudicial decision is to be made, not by a board of neutral persons, but by an agent of one of the contracting parties, the rule of construction should be at least as strict as in arbitration cases.
I think, therefore, that we have authority to decide whether the dispute which arose here was, under the contract, one for the decision of the contracting officer. I agree that it was not. On the merits I would, for the reasons I have given, decide the dispute for the plaintiff.