Court Opinion

ID: 9472253
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:54:24.713133+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:49.917510
License: Public Domain

JERRE S. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Perhaps my standards as to how sensible the law should be are too high. Appellant, Dixie Carriers, is a conscientious shipping company. It acted in the best interests of the people and in accordance with congressional policy. It undertook to clean up the oil spill caused by its barge. For its correct and conscientious concern, the majority of the Court now holds that Dixie Carriers must be penalized by paying virtually double its proper liability to the United States government under the statute. Yet the only solid justification which the opinion for the Court gives for this result is that the statute does not provide for credit for “voluntary clean up”. Yet what is critical, of course, is that Dixie Carriers expended the sum of money in cleaning up the oil spill under terms of a statute which provided pragmatically that it was doing so on behalf of the government. There is no denial of the basic proposition that if Appellant had done nothing about cleaning the oil spill it could have been held liable to the United States government for only the statutory limit of liability, just a little over one-half the amount that the Court now requires it to pay by refusing to recognize contribution. Solely because Dixie Carriers was conscientious and concerned it must pay virtually double.
The impact of this holding is not adequately dealt with in the majority opinion. After this decision, no lawyer can properly advise a client to clean up an oil spill beyond a minimum extent necessary to protect it from private claims of liability. To advise a company to move ahead as Dixie Carriers moved ahead to deal with an oil spill would render his or her client a serious disservice. It is obvious from this statute that what Congress had in mind was *187the cleaning up of oil spills as quickly as possible. But the opinion of the Court in undue rationalization requires an abdication of such responsibility on the part of the company which caused the oil spill. Under any reasonable conclusion, a company must now leave the matter to the United States government to insure that the company be responsible to the government only to the limit of liability which is clearly set out in the statute. The fact that the spilling of oil is made “unlawful” under the statute is obviously for the purpose of making the party liable to the government up to the limit of statutory liability.
The clearest and most dominant provision of this statute is the ceiling on liability to the United States government on the part of whomever caused the oil spill. Whether that is a wise limitation or not is not for us to say. It exists in the statute, and it is clear. The holding of the Court in refusing to credit the amount already expended by the company in the clean up to discharge its obligation to the United States government is circumventing the statutory limitation, as this record shows. The simplest balance sheet calculation shows that Dixie Carriers was entitled to a set off or “credit”. We allow such set offs routinely without specific statutory authorization. Under the statute Dixie Carriers was liable to the United States government for a total of $121,600. Yet, becáuse of Dixie Carriers’ own expenditure on behalf of its obligation to the United States government, the government is relieved of an additional cost of $108,465.86. Any possible amount of liability to anyone else being discharged by the expenditure by Dixie Carriers is totally non-existent under this record. Yet, Dixie Carriers, instead of having its liability limited to $121,600 under the statute finds its liability to be $230,-065.86.
This result leaves me mystified and deeply concerned. Mystified because the Court finds justification in attaching double liability to appellant when if there is anything clear in the statute it is the provision in precise terms for a single maximum liability. Deeply concerned because the result compels those who are responsible for oil spills to do exactly the opposite of what Congress obviously wanted them to do— undertake to clean up the oil spill. The reasoning of the Court leads to an unfair and unwise result. It is too intensely theoretical for me. I dissent.