Court Opinion

ID: 9421910
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:00:28.315995+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:33.089737
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Harlan,
whom Mr. Justice Frankfurter joins, dissenting.
I dissent from the Court’s disposition of this case on the following grounds:
First. For reasons elaborated in my Brother Stewart’s dissenting opinion, there is no reasonable basis for concluding that the Court of Appeals’ disposition of the negligence cause of action did not rest upon state substantive law, which in maritime wrongful death actions controls, The Tungus v. Skovgaard, 358 U. S. 588, if, as I expressed in my dissenting opinion in Hess v. United States, ante, p. 322, it does not impose duties greater than those created by maritime substantive law.
In any event, there being no suggestion that the state standards of duty differ in any way from those obtaining under maritime law, the remand of the negligence cause *345of action to the Court of Appeals seems to me to be a needless and therefore wasteful procedure.
Second. As to the unseaworthiness cause of action, no one suggests that West Virginia has such a doctrine of its own. The Court of Appeals deliberately decided (256 F. 2d, at 454) that it need not reach the difficult question of whéther the West Virginia Wrongful Death Statute embraced a cause of action for unseaworthihess based on federal concepts, because it found that in any event, under federal law, the vessel was not unseaworthy, and that the petitioner was not one to whom the duty to provide a seaworthy ship was owing.
In resting its decision on these grounds the Court of Appeals exercised the traditional discretion of any court to choose what appears to it a narrower and clearer ground of decision in preference to a broader and more controverted one. The Court does not suggest that the limits, of this discretion were exceeded in this instance. Cf. Barr v. Matteo, 355 U. S. 171. In my. view we cannot properly require the-Court of Appeals to decide a question which it intentionally and sensibly left open unless we first reverse that court on the issues which it did decide. This the Court does not do. Hence, I believe there is no justification for remanding the ease on this score.