Court Opinion

ID: 9470731
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:14:31.577373+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:04.859103
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur in the basic proposition that as a matter of law the standard of care is no different for a carrier than it is for anyone else — the duty is one of reasonable care under the circumstances. See 2 F. Harper & F. James, The Law of Torts § 16.14 (1956). The circumstances of each case of course vary, and the greater the degree of the carrier’s control or the lesser the degree of the passenger’s control over the factors causative of the injury, the easier it is to find negligence. Thus, the phrase “highest degree of care” and its variations are useful only insofar as they call a jury’s attention to the relative extent of control exercised or exercisable by the carrier so as to prevent or avoid an accident. Where the trier of fact is a judge to whom negligence is a familiar concept, any phrase suggesting degrees of care owed is at best superfluous, at worst confusing. This being a non-jury case, with the carrier not being charged with, e.g., causing the ship to veer suddenly for no reason, but rather being charged with negligence in permitting a dance floor to have a foreign obstacle on it, concealed by its size, the composition of the floor and the semi-darkness, to talk in terms of degrees of care owed makes no sense whatsoever. The vessel owner or carrier in this situation is in no different position from that of a possessor of land as to licensees and invitees, Restatement (Second) of Torts §§ 342, 343, 343A (1965).
Applying that standard to this case, I agree that the trial judge’s finding of no negligence was not clearly erroneous. While the judge, inadvertently I think, referred to the stool on the disco dance floor as three feet high when the only evidence was that it was twelve inches to eighteen inches high, he was careful to distinguish situations in which either by lack of supervision of the dance floor, failure to inspect it, or even the motion of the vessel in the sea, the stool came, was placed, or remained upon the dance floor, thereby causing injury. The judge did not explicitly consider the possibility that the stool was placed on the dance floor during the movies that were shown in the discotheque before the dancing started — a plausible inference given the fact that there were about twelve such stools, regularly used for such purpose — and *173that it might well have been negligent for the vessel’s employees to fail to inspect the dance floor and remove any remaining stools before turning the lights out for disco dancing. But this inference was by no means a necessary one from the facts proved at trial, though I believe it quite permissible; one suspects that counsel, instead of being able to adduce facts from ship personnel, passengers or other sources developing this, his appellate theory of the case, was required to rely upon the “highest duty of care” legal concept, such as it is. Be this as it may, as the trier of fact Judge Sweet was left, in his words, with the limited question whether “the mere presence [of the stool] at an isolated moment in time, without any further evidence of how it got there or how long the stool was on the dance floor” constituted negligence. Since he could not properly find that it was negligent per se to have a movable stool in a discotheque, even on a ship on the high seas, he quite understandably found no negligence. I cannot fault him on this, though another trier of fact might have concluded otherwise. I therefore concur in the judgment.