Minneapolis St Louis Railroad Company v. George Winters

• Decision Date: 08 January 1917
• Docket Number: No. 420,420
• Citation: 61 L.Ed. 358,37 S.Ct. 170,242 U.S. 353
• Parties: MINNEAPOLIS & ST. LOUIS RAILROAD COMPANY, Plff. in Err., v. GEORGE H. WINTERS
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

242 U.S. 353

37 S.Ct. 170

61 L.Ed. 358

MINNEAPOLIS & ST. LOUIS RAILROAD COMPANY, Plff. in Err.,

v GEORGE H. WINTERS.

No. 420.

Argued December 5, 1916.

Decided January 8, 1917.

Messrs. Frederick M. Miner and William H. Bremner for plaintiff in error.

Messrs. Humphrey Barton and John H. Kay for defendant in error.

Mr. Justice Holmes delivered the opinion of the court:

This is an action for personal injuries suffered by the plaintiff, the defendant in error, at Marshalltown, Iowa, on October 21, 1912. The decisions below will be found in 126 Minn. 260, 148 N. W. 106, and 131 Minn. 181, 154 N. W. 964. The declaration alleged that at the time the plaintiff was employed by the defendant in interstate commerce, although it went on to set forth laws of the state of Iowa concerning the liability of railroads and contributory negligence. It alleged that the injury was caused by the negligence of the defendant in failing to furnish a reasonably safe instrument for the work that the plaintiff was set to do. The answer denied, among other things, that the plaintiff was employed in interstate commerce, and set up the plaintiff's negligence and assumption of the risk. In the course of the trial, the facts touching the employment having been agreed, the counsel for the defendant intimated that he might want to take the question whether the commerce was interstate to this court, but said no more about it, and later moved to dismiss the suit upon the ground, among others, that the plaintiff assumed the risk, adverting to a decision that that defense was open under the Federal act. Later still the presiding judge in his charge, without objection, told the jury that the action was tried under the law of the United States; and in the assignment of errors to the supreme court of the state, one error assigned was that the jury was instructed that they might find a less than unanimous verdict in a suit founded upon the Federal Employers' Liability Act,—a proposition disposed of since the trial by a decision of this court. Minneapolis & St. L. R. Co. v. Bombolis, 241 U. S. 211, 60 L. ed. 961, L.R.A.1917A, 86, 36 Sup. Ct. Rep. 595.

It is true that error is assigned because the court affirmed its opinion rendered after a former trial. But in the assignment of errors to the state court no such error is alleged, and beyond judicial recitals that the evidence, with some exceptions, was the same at both trials, and quotations from the decision as to negligence, the record shows nothing but a casual statement of counsel as to what was done or ruled before. In short, at the trial the defendant in no way saved its rights to deny that the parties were engaged in interstate commerce at the time of the accident, or to object to the application of the Federal statute. On the contrary, without qualification it invoked and relied upon that statute and the rights that, because of that statute, it supposed itself to possess. There is an ambiguous assignment of error that the supreme court of the...