Court Opinion

ID: 9451738
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:22:37.705797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:51.948986
License: Public Domain

FRIENDLY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
This case, like others that come to us in increasing numbers, falls between two reasonably plain lines of authority. If a ship has equipment safe for a task, and only that, she is not rendered unseaworthy by a seaman’s failure to use what has been provided for him. Ezekiel v. Volusia S.S. Co., 297 F.2d 215, 91 A.L.R.2d 1013 (2 Cir. 1961), cert. denied, Pinto v. States Marine Corp., 369 U.S. 843, 82 S.Ct. 874, 7 L.Ed.2d 847 (1962); Guarracino v. Luckenbach S.S. Co., 333 F.2d 646 (2 Cir.), cert. denied, 379 U.S. 946, 85 S.Ct. 439, 13 L.Ed.2d 543 (1964). On the other hand, if a seaman is injured by use of unsafe equipment, e. g., a rope with a latent defect, the ship cannot escape liability for unseaworthiness because safe equipment also was available. Mahnich v. Southern S.S. Co., 321 U.S. 96, 103-104, 64 S.Ct. 455, 88 L.Ed. 561 (1944). Here the lifting gear the ship turned over to the stevedore was entirely sound; every piece of it was staunch, solid and suited to its intended use. Plaintiff’s injury resulted solely from the negligent manner in which the stevedores employed it.
The problem whether a ship becomes unseaworthy when stevedores put safe equipment to improper use was first presented to this court in Strika v. Netherlands Ministry of Traffic, 185 F.2d 555, 556 (2 Cir. 1950), cert. denied, 341 U.S. 904, 71 S.Ct. 614, 95 L.Ed. 1343.(1951). Judge Learned Hand decided it in favor of the plaintiff rather cavalierly, saying, “In answer we need only cite Mahnich v. Southern S.S. Co.” Later, evidently realizing that Mahnich was not truly dis-positive and the question thus not so easily dispatched, he engaged in further elaboration: although it “would be futile to try to draw any line between situations in which the defect is only an incident in a continuous operation, and those in which some intermediate step is to be taken as making the ship unsea-worthy,” the two situations must nevertheless be separated on the particular •circumstances of each case. Grillea v. United States, 232 F.2d 919, 922 (2 Cir. 1956). Judge Swan dissented in both cases, insisting in Grillea that “[t]he long recognized distinction between injuries caused by unseaworthy gear and injuries caused by improper use of proper gear” had not been “completely wiped out” by Supreme Court decisions. 232 F.2d at 924.
Our efforts to carry out Judge Hand’s mandate in Grillea, a principle which my brother Hays has characterized as “far from satisfactory,” Puddu v. Royal Netherlands S.S. Co., 303 F.2d 752, 757 (2 Cir. 1962), have been wholly unsuccessful — perhaps because we have not correctly apprehended just what Judge Hand meant. I cannot see, for example, what meaningful distinction my brothers find between this case and Massa v. C. A. Venezuelan Navigacion, 332 F.2d 779 (2 Cir.), cert. denied, 379 U.S. 914, 85 S.Ct. 262, 13 L.Ed.2d 186 (1964); a rig in which one metal bar is connected with a top pallet and another with the bottom pallet seems just as unseaworthy to me as one in which a ladder is suspended on an open hook. But neither can I see any satisfactory distinction between Massa where the stevedore lost and Strika where he won. If the test is a temporal one, a more accurate stopwatch than I possess would be needed to explain why Reid v. Quebec Paper Sales & Transp. Co., 340 F.2d 34 (2 Cir. 1965), should have gone one way and Puddu v. Royal Netherlands S.S. Co., 303 F.2d 752 (2 Cir.), cert. denied, 371 U.S. 840, 83 S.Ct. 67, 9 L.Ed.2d 75 (1962), and Spinelli v. Isthmian S.S. Co., 326 F.2d 870 (2 Cir.), cert. denied, 377 U.S. 935, 84 S.Ct. 1338, 12 L.Ed.2d 298 (1964), the other.1 What *544is more important, taking all six cases— Strika, Grilled, Reid, Puddu, Spinelli, and Mdssd — the first three going for the plaintiff and the last three for the ship, I fail to see any meaningful difference either in the ship’s performance or the plaintiff’s deserts.
It is time to scuttle a doctrine which requires judges to make distasteful hairsplitting distinctions unrelated to any intelligible concepts of right and wrong; granted that liability for unseaworthiness does not rest on fault, it ought to rest on something more than casuistry.' Indeed, I suspect we would long since have revolted against a principle which capriciously imposes liability on a thoroughly well equipped ship if we did not know that in the usual case, where the plaintiff “seaman” is shore-based, the story will have a happy ending for the ship since liability will rest on her only for a moment and then will be transferred to the stevedoring contractor. By very definition, improper use of ship’s equipment triggers the contractor’s warranty of workmanlike service, Ryan Stevedoring Co. v. Pan-Atlantic S.S. Corp., 350 U.S. 124, 76 S.Ct. 232, 100 L.Ed. 133 (1956), the ship regularly im-pleads the stevedore, and there the burden falls. To me this argues for a restrictive rather than an expansive notion of unseaworthiness in these situations; courts should not strain to use the ship, innocent in every realistic sense, merely as a conduit for imposing on the negligent employer a liability to his employees differing from the absolute but limited one which Congress made exclusive by § 5 of the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, 33 U.S.C. § 905. Of course the statute did not impair an injured longshoreman’s right against third parties who have wronged him, 33 U.S.C. § 933. But proper respect for what Congress was “driving at,” see Johnson v. United States, 163 F. 30, 32, 18 L.R.A.,N.S., 1194 (1 Cir. 1908) (Holmes, J.), ought to lead judges away from a doctrine which so frustrates the legislative purpose by imposing a transitory liability on a third party that has turned over a thoroughly seaworthy vessel to a qualified stevedore. If the benefits under the Compensation Act are inadequate, the remedy lies in action by Congress, not in judicial legerdemain which helps one longshoreman but does nothing for another whose situation would appear similar to everyone except those lawyers and judges who have had to accustom themselves to the witty diversities of this branch of the law.
My view necessarily rests on the assumption, which I believe to be sound, that the issue has not been settled otherwise by the Supreme Court. Although the Court has indeed expanded the notion and the coverage of unseaworthiness, it has not yet dealt with the problem of a momentarily unsafe condition created solely by negligence of stevedores in the course of their work; in the one instance in which it cited this aspect of the Grilled decision, the Supreme Court did not endorse this court’s holding, declaring that it “need not go so far” since the winch had been “adjusted by those acting for the vessel owner in a way that made it unsafe and dangerous for the work at hand.” Crumady v. The J. H. Fisser, 358 U.S. 423, 427, 79 S.Ct. 445, 448, 3 L.Ed.2d 413 (1959). The Strika decision was approved in Gutierrez v. Waterman S.S. Corp., 373 U.S. 206, 215, 83 S.Ct. 1185, 10 L.Ed.2d 297 (1963), but only in its holding that a ship was liable for effects of unseaworthiness realized on shore. And while I recognize that Morales v. City of Galveston, 370 U.S. 165; 82 S.Ct. 1226, 8 L.Ed. 2d 412 (1962) is distinguishable, it at least shows that a condition created in loading a vessel can be too momentary to render her unseaworthy.

. The hypothetical case put in Orillea, 232 F.2d at 922, where longshoremen had left the ship in an unseaworthy condition and were injured on their return the next day, would rest on an intelligible distinction.