Court Opinion

ID: 9419409
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:49:21.731042+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:17.951499
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Black,
dissenting:
Twelve North Carolina citizens who heard many witnesses and saw many exhibits found on their oaths that the railroad’s employees were negligent. The local trial judge sustained their finding. Four members of this Court agree with the local trial judge that the jury’s conclusion was reasonable. Nevertheless five members of the Court *485purport to weigh all the evidence offered by both parties to the suit, and hold the conclusion was unreasonable. Truly, appellate review of jury verdicts by application of a supposed norm of reasonableness gives rise to puzzling results.1
Although I do not agree that the “uniform federal rule” on directed verdicts announced by the Court correctly states the law, I place my dissent on the ground that, whatever rule be applied, petitioner sufficiently alleged and proved at least two separate acts of negligence attributable to the respondent railroad but for which the decedent Brady would probably have escaped death. The first was the act of one of respondent’s trainmen in negligently closing the derailer; the second, the act of respondent’s maintenance crew in negligently keeping a defective rail opposite that derailer. Proof of either was sufficient in itself to support a jury verdict against respondent under the terms of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act.2
*486Negligence in closing derailer. A contributing cause to decedent’s death was that the derailer was in a closed position at the time the engineer backed the engine and four cars into it. That the derailer should have been open is not disputed. The evidence was sufficient to show that the employee who negligently closed the derailer must have been either the flagman, the conductor, or the decedent. The flagman expressly denied that he closed the derailer, but the conductor made no such denial. Petitioner, although deprived of decedent’s testimony, did produce evidence from which the jury could find that it was not decedent who closed it. Testimony established that decedent knew of the existence and location of the derailer, that he was an experienced brakeman, and that he would be aware of the danger of riding a freight car over a closed derailer. From these facts the jury could'find that decedent thought the derailer was open since he would not likely have signalled the train over a closed derailer at the peril of his own safety and protection. Cf. Atchison, T. & S. F. Ry. Co. v. Toops, 281 U. S. 351, 356. A similar inference is not justified as regards the flagman and conductor for the evidence shows that at the time of the accident both were a half mile away and therefore were not imperiled by the decedent’s signalling back the train and were not in a position to have prevented the signal.3
*487Having thus brought forth evidence that one of respondent’s employees negligently closed the derailer and that decedent was not that employee, petitioner had proved a ease for the jury. I cannot agree with the view apparently adopted by the Court that the petitioner was required to pin the negligence on a particular one of decedent’s fellow employees. No such burden is imposed by the Federal Act. It provides merely that a railroad is liable “for . . . death resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of any of the . . . employees.” (Italics supplied.) 4
Negligence in keeping defective rail opposite derailer. There was evidence to show that the rail of the pass track opposite the derailer had been used for twenty-six years; that the top of the rail was decayed, rusty, badly worn, and thin; that with bare fingers metal slivers could easily be picked from both sides of the rail; and that some of the cross ties were old, not properly supported by ballast, and sloped toward the defective rail. Petitioner then offered expert evidence, contradicted by respondent’s expert evidence, that the derailment would not have occurred but for this defective rail. The Court declines to give any effect whatever to all of this evidence on two stated grounds: (1) That the rail was suitable for ordinary use and the backing of the train improperly over the closed derailer was not “a danger reasonably to have been anticipated”; (2) That the “weak rail” was not the “proximate cause” of the death.
It is difficult to imagine how, except by sheer guessing, or by drawing upon some undisclosed superior fund of wisdom, the Court reaches the conclusion that respondent *488need not have foreseen that trains would be backed over the wrong end of closed derailers. The evidence of railroad men who had worked on railroads showed it was foreseeable. Doubtless judges know more about formal logic and legal principles than do brakemen, engineers, and divisional superintendents. I am not so certain that they know more about the danger of keeping a defective rail immediately opposite a derailer. The Divisional Superintendent of the Southern Railway Company, put on the stand by the respondent, testified that trains backed over closed derailers “very frequently.'’' He himself had seen it happen “on 25 to 50 occasions.” And undisputed evidence, including photographs, showed that respondent had foreseen this likelihood to the extent that the top of the derailer had a special groove to hold the flange of a wheel as it passed over the back of the derailer. That a train would ordinarily not be backed over a closed derailer except for the personal negligence of the train crew is not determinative of the issue of foreseeability. The standard of reasonable conduct may require the defendant to protect the plaintiff against “that occasional negligence which is one of the ordinary incidents of human life and therefore to be anticipated. . . .”5 And the mere fact that the negligence of the respondent in placing the weak rail in the track occurred several years before the accident does not establish that the subsequent injury was not foreseeable. The negligent conduct of respondent not only consisted of “placing the weak rail in the track”; it also consisted of keeping the “weak rail” there.
Nor is it easy to comprehend why the defective rail was not the “proximate cause” of the injury. It was the last “link in an unbroken chain of reasonably foreseeable events” which cost the employee his life. Surely this rail *489was the “proximate cause” if those words be used to mean an event which contributes to produce a result, which is the meaning Congress intended when it made railroads liable for the injury or death of an employee “due to” or “resulting in whole or in part from” the railroad’s negligence.6 The record shows that two expert witnesses with many years of railroad experience testified that the accident was caused by the defective rail. That one of these witnesses on cross-examination stated the derailment would not have occurred “nine times out of ten” if there had been a sound rail hardly justifies a directed verdict against petitioner. The fact of causation is no different from any other fact and does not have to be proved with absolute certainty; ninety per cent certainty should suffice to make it an issue for the jury. That a sound rail would have given the deceased nine chances out of ten to escape death should be enough to give his family and the community the protection which the Act contemplates.
Mr. Justice Douglas, Mr. Justice Murphy, and Mr. Justice Rutledge concur in this opinion.

 For an enlightening exposition of the uncertainties generated by excessive judicial use of the norm of reasonableness, see Jackson, Trial Practice in Accident Litigation (1930), 15 Cornell Law Quarterly, 194 et seq. It was the writer’s opinion that there was “a persistent, insidious, and plausible tendency toward uncertainty in everything that legal reasoning touches,” and that this tendency was “easier to illustrate than to describe.” Had today’s decision then been available, it could well have been added to the several decisions which were used as illustrations. Likewise the criticism which the writer directed at these illustrative decisions is exactly applicable to what the Court today, by applying a legal doctrine misnamed “proximate cause,” has done to the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. For what it has done is to choose “between two lines of public policy. It could not think in the simple terms of the statutory command; it reverted to the complex legal reasoning involving a combination of principles and depending upon multiplied conditions which the statute tried to supersede.”

 “Every common carrier by railroad while engaging in commerce between any of the several States or Territories . . . shall be liable in damages to any person suffering injury while he is employed by such *486carrier in such commerce, or, in case of the death of such employee, to Iris or her personal representative ... for such injury or death resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of any of the officers, agents, or employees of such carrier, or by reason of any defect or insufficiency, due to its negligence, in its cars, engines, appliances, machinery, track, roadbed, ... or other equipment.” 35 Stat. 65, as amended; 53 Stat. 1404; U. S. C., Title 45, § 51.

 Uncontradieted testimony showed that both the flagman and the conductor were under the duty to operate the derailer in switching operations when the train was long. Here the train was four hundred yards in length. The conductor admitted that he had operated the derafler once during the switching operation, and that he had been *487in a place where he could have closed it before the engine and four cars backed into it. Not one of the conductor’s fellow employees testified as to what the conductor was doing at the time when the derailer must have been closed.

 See Note 2, supra.

 Restatement of Torts § 302, Comment l. See also Prosser on Torts (1941) § 37, p. 243.

 See Note 2, supra.