Court Opinion

ID: 9443146
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:12:18.890897+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:23.281282
License: Public Domain

FRANK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
My colleagues, as I 'understand them,, have interpreted the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act to> mean this:
An employee subject to the Act is killedi on the job but leaves no dependent relatives behind who are eligible for compensation. The employer is required to pay' instead $1,000 into a statutory fund. In return, he receives the unfettered right to-sue, settle or bury all claims of the seaman, his estate, or any of his relatives against a third-party responsible for the-death. The estate and the relatives are-stymied. They cannot themselves prosecute-any suits against the third party in any court, state or federal, under any statute,, state or federal. The employer takes over all such rights against the third party. Presumably, the assignment is to give the: *983employer some indemnity for his $1,000 payment. o
To be sure, anything he recovers over that $1,000, he must return to the estate or the relatives. This fact, however, remains: Most employers are fully insured for any compensation they pay out; practically speaking, neither the employer nor his insurer (because of the paucity of the $1,000 contribution) will undertake an expensive, time-consuming, worrisome lawsuit to recover $1,000. If they do anything at all, more likely it will be to compromise the third-party claim for a sum sufficient to indemnify themselves but not to compensate anyone else. The employer or his insurer will often refuse, for business, financial, or public-relations reasons, to allow the relatives’ suits to be prosecuted in the employer’s name.
I find it hard to believe that Congress meant so relentlessly to sacrifice the employee’s family to the employer who makes a $1,000 contribution to a fund from which the family can gain nothing. There is not one word of congressional history — -reports, hearings or debates — to compel such a conclusion. Only the literal language of the statute can be invoked to sanction such a result. I agree with Judge Learned Hand and other judges who have resisted what a wag might call the lexicographic logic of the literal language litany. I agree with Judge Hand’s remarks in Federal Deposit Insurance Co. v. Tremaine, 2 Cir., 133 F.2d, 827, 830. “There is no surer guide in the interpretation of a statute than its purpose when that is sufficiently disclosed; nor any surer mark of over solicitude for the letter than to wince at carrying out that purpose because the words do not formally quite match with it.” It is, he said in Cabell v. Markham, 2 Cir., 148 F.2d 737, 739, “one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.”
That view is particularly pertinent here. For, in Doleman v. Levine, 295 U.S. 221, 229, 55 S.Ct. 741, 745, 79 L.Ed. 1402, the Supreme Court, recognizing the scissors- and-paste character of the Act we are here interpreting, said that “it seems beyond the resources of judicial ingenuity to construe the statute so as to give it a wholly consistent and harmonious operation”. And the other day, interpreting a statute similarly composed, the Court said: “Instead of a carefully matured enactment, the legislation was a makeshift patchwork. Such legislation strongly counsels against literalness of application. It favors a wise latitude of construction in enforcing its purposes.” Guessefeldt v. McGrath, U.S., 72 S.Ct. 338, 344.
Accordingly, I suggest an interpretation of § 33 (c) which, I think, (1) fits in better with the Supreme Court’s liberal interpretation of employees’ rights under § 33(a), and relatives’ rights under § 33(b), see Seas Shipping Co. v. Sieracki, 328 U.S. 85, 66 S.Ct. 872, 90 L.Ed. 1099; Doleman v. Levine, 295 U.S. 221, 55 S.Ct. 741, 79 L.Ed. 1402, and (2) avoids two major incongruities in the Act’s treatment of relatives as my colleagues construe it. Under my interpretation, the employer would obtain an assignment of no more than the legal representatives’ wholly equitable interest (if any) in a claim against the third party. The employer would obtain no assignment where, pursuant to the applicable state statute, the legal representative, although the sole person authorized to bring the suit against the third person, does so merely as a “statutory trustee,” or nominal plaintiff, with the proceeds of the suit all going to relatives of the deceased. My interpretation stems from a consideration of the following :
In the majority of the states providing for wrongful-death actions, the suit is brought by an administrator; in about a dozen states, the beneficiaries of the action may sue in their own names. See Death, 16 Am.Jur. § 263. As this court has said, the administrator in the first group of states is “merely a nominal plaintiff,” and the “real parties in interest are the beneficiaries whom he represents.” Cooper v. American Airlines, 2 Cir., 149 F.2d 355, 359, 162 A.L.R. 318. In that case, the question was whether an administrator acting under the *984Kentucky statute could maintain suit in New York. We said: “If those beneficiaries had been permitted to and had brought suit in their own names, unquestionably their actions would not have been ousted. To reach a different conclusion because the nominal plaintiff is a representative appointed by a court of another state would be to rest judgment, irrationally, on the sheerest verbalism. We have too much respect for the New York Court of Appeals to believe that it would do so.”1
My colleagues, however, come very close to doing just that. They treat differently (a) relatives who can sue in their own names and (b) relatives who must bring suit through a statutory trustee, although in both instances the relatives have exactly the same equitable interest in and expectation of recovery, i. e., the same “right to recover.” Where the suit must be in the administrator’s name, the relatives can, if necessary, compel him to bring the action. Yet my colleagues hold that, merely because it is brought in an administrator’s name and not in the relatives’ names, therefore, under § 33(c) they lose to the employer their rights to recover. I cannot attribute to Congress such a capricious distinction with such drastic results as follow, for example, in the instant case. To repeat, I think that, reasonably interpreted, § 33(c) assigns to the employer control over only those rights to recover on behalf of the estate which normally belong, both legally and equitably, to the employee’s executor or administrator. See Cooper v. American Airlines, supra, 149 F.2d 355, 358.2
The solicitude of the Supreme Court for relatives’ rights under § 33(b) highlights, the shabbiness of their treatment under my colleagues’ interpretation of § 33(c). See Doleman v. Levine, 295 U.S. 221, 55 S.Ct. 741, 79 L.Ed. 1402. There the Court decided that when an employee leaves (1) relatives who are eligible and elect to take compensation under the Act and (2) relatives who are either not eligible or do not elect to take compensation, § 33(b), which assigns to the employer “all right of the person entitled to compensation”, gives him only the “share [of the relatives actually compensated] in the proceeds of recovery and, if necessary, by appropriate proceedings [the right to] compel the administrator to bring the suit and account for its proceeds.” The employer acquires no right to control the litigation altogether, even, if all the relatives entitled to take compensation choose to do so. For, reasoned the Court, “There may be next of kin of the decedent entitled- to share in the recovery for wrongful death who are not entitled to compensation, and others who> elect, as provided in section 33(a) to take their share of the recovery for wrongful death instead of compensation. A construction of section '33 which would require the use of their shares to indemnify the employer, for payments to others who have elected to receive compensation, is not to be favored in the absence of language plainly requiring it.”3 Incidentally, in the same *985case, the Court found no difficulty in what my colleagues call “restricting the broad power to compromise conferred on the employer by § 933(d)” to meet the equities ■of the situation. The Court said: “Section 33(d) authorizes the employer, ‘on account ■of such assignment,’ to compromise the claim for damages or to institute proceedings upon it. Its provisions are permissive only * * * in a case like the present, where the right assigned to the employer is to receive a part only of the proceeds of recovery for the wrongful death, the language falls short of conferring upon him authority to compromise or sue upon claims which ‘such assignment’ does not operate to transfer.”
We have then the following anomaly: A longshoreman dies, leaving both dependent and non-dependent relatives. The non-dependent relatives preserve their rights to sue, no matter what the dependent relatives do or how much the employer pays them. If another longshoreman dies, leaving only non-dependent relatives, then, if my colleagues are correct, those relatives lose all ■their rights to sue, because of the employer’s payment of $1,000. I submit that this interpretation needlessly attributes a perversity, an irrationality, to legislators intent upon providing liberal compensation to employees injured in the line of duty and to their families. Under my suggested interpretation, no such distinction would be drawn: Whenever, by a state statute, relatives have the exclusive right to recover all or a specific portion of the proceeds of a wrongful death action, whether brought in their own name or through an administrator, then, regardless of the existence or non-existence of dependent relatives, the federal statute does not destroy that right. So, here, I would deny the motion to dismiss, and allow the employee’s son to bring suit for his father’s death.

. We were right about the New York Court of Appeals. See its subsequent ruling, following Cooper v. American Airlines, in Wiener v. Specific Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 298 N.Y. 346, 83 N.E.2d 673.
New Jersey is one of the states where the suit must be brought by an administrator as statutory trustee. N.J.S.A. 2:47-2. Cooper v. American Airlines, supra, note 8. Like most states, New Jersey does not require a showing of dependency for recovery — only pecuniary loss. Thus the adult son might have recovered here. Lemarest v. Little, 47 N. J.L. 28.

. There is an additional small group of states which require the administrator to bring suit in behalf of the estate, but which render the proceeds of such suit inaccessible to creditors, and distributable in specified portions to stated beneficiaries. Obviously, in those cases, the estate, like the administrator, is a, mere conduit for the real beneficiaries. I would therefore treat relatives in those states exactly like relatives who can sue in their own names or share directly in the proceeds of a suit brought in the administrator’s name. See Death, 16 Am. . Jur. § 249.

. Indeed, if the literal language rule had been followed in construing § 33(b), the employer would receive nothing as a result of the assignment to him of “all right” to “recover damages” from the compensated relative. For if, as my colleagues believe, “right to recover” means *985“right to bring suit,” then ' the relative had no such right where the action had ío be prosecuted jointly with other reíatives and in the administrator’s name. True, there is language in Doleman v. Levine which supports my colleagues’ interpretation of § 33(c). But that language is obiter, for there the Court did not have before it a case involving § 33 (e)