Court Opinion

ID: 9444385
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 20:59:22.025795+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:51.126708
License: Public Domain

L. HAND, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
- I agree with all my brothers say except as to the release. Two, questions about it arise: (1) As a matter of interpreta-; tion did it cover the assault on the Toma? hawk? (2) If so, should the plaintiff be allowed to repudiate it? The doctrine has indeed been pressed to great lengths that general words of release will be disregarded when they accompany the release of a specified claim. Yet I do not understand that it has ever been held that an obligee cannot make a general release covering every claim he may have, known or unknown, if it is coupled with the release of a particular claim. I cannot imagine any rational ground for so holding; and the courts have said over and over again that the question is always one of “intent,” however equivocally that may be used. It would be impossible, I submit, more explicitly to state a purpose “to wipe the slate clean,” *548—as the parties themselves put it — than the language of this release has stated a purpose to do just that. Thus, I should have no doubt about the proper way to construe this release, even if it had appeared that the plaintiff supposed that he had had a claim arising out of his fall on the Mission San Francisco. However, although, as my brothers suggest, he and his lawyers may have “had in mind solely the happéning on board the ‘Mission San Francisco’ and thought he had a claim based solely thereon,” there is no evidence to support such an assumption; and as matter of mere speculation it seems to me extremely unlikely. The judge made no such finding, but rested his judgment only upon the fact that the release mentioned the wrong ship: i. e. the claim in suit was not identified. I submit that, even though it be applied with the most rigid literalness, the necessary ground for the doctrine is absent until we can see that the parties had before them some specific claim other than that on which this action was brought.
As to the second question, once the verbal scope of the claim is fixed, I cannot see that any of the protection properly accorded to seamen was not granted; I am content to abide by the test laid down in Garrett v. Moore-McCormack Co., 317 U.S. 239, 248, 63 S.Ct. 246, 87 L.Ed. 239. Indeed I think that our own decision in Sitchon v. American Export Lines, 2 Cir., 113 F.2d 830, should control, though the facts were not absolutely on all fours. If what we are holding is the law, every seaman is free to get what he can get, keep it, and gamble on whether he can later persuade the judge or the jury that he forgot the existence of the only claim he ever in fact did have. No one can escape his own limitations and my difference with my brothers may come from an insensibility to the economic subjection of seamen, and from a failure to make enough allowance for their credulity; but, confined as I am, it seems to me that to allow this release to be repudiated is not only unwarranted in law, but unsanctioned in morals.