Court Opinion

ID: 9422610
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:03:34.071092+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:37.920565
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
whom Mr. Justice Stewart joins,
dissenting.
This decision goes further than anything yet done by the Court in F. E. L. A. and admiralty cases (see, e. g., Rogers v. Missouri Pac. R. Co., 352 U. S. 500, and its offspring, and Gutierrez v. Waterman S. S. Corp., ante, p. 206) to do what it considers “justice” to those who have become the unfortunate victims of industrial accidents. For it is no exaggeration to say that in holding that a longshoreman may recover from his own employer for injuries suffered in the course of employment, the Court has effectively “repealed” a basic aspect of the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation-Act.
The violence done to the statutory scheme is most simply shown merely by quoting the relevant portions of the two provisions that govern the question before us. The first is the definition of “employer” as :
“an employer any of whose employees are employed in maritime employment, in whole or in part, upon the navigable waters of the United States (including any dry dock).” § 2 (4), 44 Stat. 1425,33 U. S. C. §902 (4).
The second is § 5, a provision entitled “Exclusiveness of liability,” which states:
“The liability of an employ er-[f or the compensation] prescribed in section 4 shall be exclusive and in place of all other liability of such employer to the employee ... at law or in admiralty on account of such injury or death . . . .” 44 Stat. 1426, 33 U. S. C. § 905.
*417There being no doubt that petitioner is an “employee” within the meaning of the Act,1 there is thus no question that he is - excluded from recovering from his employer, Pan’-Atlantic, in this action. Under a statute which was specifically written to include shipowners who employed their own dockworkers, and which excluded liability at law or in admiralty, there is no room for concluding that an employer shipowner can be held liable to his own longshoreman employee for unseaworthiness. Indeed, the point is so clear that petitioner has had what I would have thought was the good sense not even to argue to the contrary. (He has instead based his argument wholly on the théory that the ship itself may be liable even in the absence of any underlying personal liability on the part of anyone.)
While conceding that the statute “on its face lends support” to the conclusion that neither party has challenged, the Court refuses to give what it describes as “blind adherence to the superficial meaning” of the Act. But if exclusiveness of liability is the “superficial” meaning, then what, may it be asked, is the “true” congressional purpose in enacting this legislation? The statutory design was nowhere more concisely or more accurately summarized than in the dissenting opinion in Ryan Stevedoring Co. v. Pan-Atlantic S. S. Corp., 350 U. S. 124, 140, where it was stated:
“Congress weighed the conflicting, interests of employers and employees and struck what was considered to be a fair and constitutional balance. Injured employees thereby lost their chance to get large tort verdicts against their employers, but gained the right to get a sure though frequently a more modest recovery. However, § 33 did leave employees a chance to *418recover extra tort damages from third persons who negligently injured them. And while Congress imposed absolute liability on employers, they were also accorded counterbalancing advantages. They were no longer to be subjected to the hazards of large tort-verdicts. Under no circumstances were they to be held liable to their own employees for more than the compensation clearly fixed in the Act. Thus employers were given every reason to believe they could buy their insurance and make other business arrangements on the basis of the limited Compensation Act liability.” (Footnote omitted.)
Congress, then, deliberately gave employers certain “counterbalancing advantages” in exchange for imposing-on them absolute liability. If these advantages are to be discarded as purely “superficial,” then the true purpose of the statute was apparently to give an additional remedy to employees while not requiring them to relinquish any existing remedies as part of the bargain. This, of course, is precisely the opposite of what Congress explicitly aimed to do.
The Court is frank to admit that the real reason for its decision is that a contrary result would make little economic sense after the decision in Ryan, supra, holding that, on the basis of an implied contract of indemnity, a shipowner is entitled to reimbursement from an independent stevedore of a judgment obtained against the shipowner by the stevedore’s employee. Admittedly, the liability imposed in Ryan is similar to the liability imposed on Pan-Atlantic in the present case. But what is overlooked is that the Ryan result can be squared with the statute, resting as it did on the stevedoring company’s voluntarily assumed contractual obligation to indemnify the third-party shipowner, while the present result cannot. Granting that petitioner could have recovered in this case for faulty equipment brought aboard by longshoremen if the ship had been operated by an independ*419ent company, cf. Alaska S. S. Co. v. Petterson, 347 U. S. 396, I believe that any anomaly between that case and this one should be left to Congress to remedy, for it may be that it would choose means wholly different from those chosen by the Court. There is ah outer limit beyond which .judicial construction of the language of a statute ought not go, and I respectfully submit that that limit has been exceeded here.
Believing that there is no basis on which recovery by petitioner can be sustained,2 I would affirm the judgment below.

 The Act in §2 (3), 44 Stat. 1425, 33 U. S. C. §902 (3), defines “employee,” and excludes only masters and members of a crew and those engaged to load or unload any small vessel under 18 tons net.

 The basis of recovery urged by petitioner is that in rem liability of the ship can exist even without any underlying personal liability. But I fully agree with the court below (cf. Guzman v. Pichirilo, 369 U. S. 698, 704 (dissenting opinion)) that such a result would be a gross misapplication of a fiction whose principal modern function is as a procedural device to provide a convenient forum where' none would otherwise be available. See Continental Grain Co. v. Barge FBL-585, 364 U. S. 19, 23-24. The reasons against its application to create substantive liability were eloquently stated by Mr. Justice Bradley, speaking for the Court in City of Norwich, 118 U. S. 468, 503: “To say that an owner is not liable, but that his vessel is liable,, seems to us like talking in riddles. ... In the' matter of liability, a man and his property cannot be separated . . . .”
The Court also suggests that there may be another basis for recovery that is not reached apparently on the ground that it was not properly preserved: that Waterman, the demisor, was not absolved by the making of a bareboat charter from liability for unseaworthiness arising after the demise. I see no procedural barrier to consideration of this theory as possible support for petitioner’s recovery against the ship, but T do not believe it can be sustained on its merits. I agree with the court below, and with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, see Grillea v. United States, 229 F. 2d 687, 690, that a demisor should not be held hable for unseaworthiness resulting solely from the equipment brought on board by the demisee’s employees. An analogy may concededly be drawn to this Court’s holding in Alaska S. S. Co. v. Petterson, supra, relating to the shipowner’s liability for equipment brought on board by a stevedore, but I would .not extend that one-sentence 6-3 per curiam decision beyond its precise facts. Cf. Gutierrez v. Waterman S. S. Corp., supra, at 216 (dissenting opinion).