Ferguson v. Cormack Lines

• Citation: 1 L.Ed.2d 511,1957 A.M.C. 647,352 U.S. 521,77 S.Ct. 457
• Decision Date: 25 February 1957
• Docket Number: MOORE-M,No. 59,59
• Parties: Henry FERGUSON, Petitioner, v. cCORMACK LINES, Inc
• Court: United States Supreme Court

352 U.S. 521

77 S.Ct. 457

1 L.Ed.2d 511

Henry FERGUSON, Petitioner,

v MOORE-McCORMACK LINES, Inc.

No. 59.

Argued Dec. 10, 1956.

Decided Feb. 25, 1957.

Mr. George J. Engelman, New York City, for the petitioner.

Mr. William A. Wilson, New York City, for the respondent.

Mr. Justice DOUGLAS announced the judgment of the Court and an opinion in which The CHIEF JUSTICE, Mr. Justice CLARK and Mr. Justice BRENNAN join.

Petitioner was injured in 1950 while serving as a second baker on respondent's passenger ship Brazil. Among his duties he was required to fill orders of the ship's waiters for ice cream. On the day of the accident, he had received an order from a ship's waiter for 12 portions of ice cream. When he got half way down in the two-and-one-half-gallon ice-cream container from which he was filling these orders, the ice cream was so hard that it could not be removed with the hemispherical scoop with which he had been furnished. Petitioner undertook to remove the ice cream with a sharp butcher knife kept nearby, grasping the handle and chipping at the hard ice cream. The knife struck a spot in the ice cream which was so hard that his hand slipped down onto the blade of the knife, resulting in the loss of two fingers of his right hand.

Petitioner brought this suit under the Jones Act, 41 Stat. 1007, 46 U.S.C. § 688, 46 U.S.C.A. § 688, to recover for his injuries which were alleged to be the result of respondent's negligence. At the close of petitioner's case, respondent's motion for a directed verdict was denied. Respondent offered no evidence. After the jury returned a verdict of $17,500 for the petitioner, respondent moved to set aside the verdict. This motion was also denied and judgment entered for the petitioner in accordance with the jury verdict. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding that it was 'not within the realm of reasonable foreseeability' that petitioner would use the knife to chip the frozen ice cream. 228 F.2d 891, 892. We granted certiorari. 351 U.S. 936, 76 S.Ct. 835, 100 L.Ed. 1464.

We conclude that there was sufficient evidence to take to the jury the question whether respondent was negligent in failing to furnish petitioner with an adequate tool with which to perform his task.

Petitioner testified that the hard ice cream could have been loosened safely with an ice chipper. He had used such an instrument for that purpose on other ships. He was not, however, furnished such an instrument. There was evidence that the scoop with which he had been furnished was totally inadequate to remove ice cream of the consistency of that which he had to serve. And, there was evidence that its extremely hard consistency was produced by the failure of another member of the crew to transfer it from the deep freeze to a tempering chest in sufficient time to allow all of it to become disposable by means of the scoop when the time came for it to be served. There was no showing that any device was close at hand which would have safely performed the task. Finally, there was evidence that petitioner had been instructed to give the waiters prompt service.

Respondent urges that it was not reasonably foreseeable that petitioner would utilize the knife to loosen the ice cream. But the jury, which plays a pre-eminent role in these Jones Act cases, Jacob v. City of New York, 315 U.S. 752, 62 S.Ct. 854, 88 L.Ed. 1166; Schulz v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 350 U.S. 523, 76 S.Ct. 608, 100 L.Ed. 668, could conclude that petitioner had been furnished no safe tool to perform his task. It was not necessary that respondent be in a position to foresee the exact chain of circumstances which actually led to the accident. The jury was instructed that it might consider whether respondent could have anticipated that a knife would be used to get out the ice cream. On this record, fair-minded men could conclude that respondent should have foreseen that petitioner might be tempted to use a knife to perform his task with dispatch, since no adequate implement was furnished him. See Schulz v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 350 U.S. 523, 526, 76 S.Ct. 608, 610, 100 L.Ed. 668. Since the standard of liability under the Jones Act is that established by Congress under the Federal Employers' Liability Act, 45 U.S.C.A. § 51 et seq., what we said in Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. Co., 352 U.S. 500, 77 S.Ct. 443, is relevant here:

'Under this statute the test of a jury case is simply whether the proofs justify with reason the conclusion that employer negligence played any part, even the slightest, in producing the injury or death for which damages are sought.'

Because the jury could have so concluded, the Court of Appeals erred in holding that respondent's motion for a directed verdict should have been granted. 'Courts should not assume that in determining these questions of negligence juries will fall short of a fair performance of their constitutional function.' Wilkerson v. McCarthy, 336 U.S. 53, 62, 69 S.Ct. 413, 418, 93 L.Ed. 497.

Reversed.

Mr. Justice BURTON concurs in the result.

Mr. Justice REED would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

Mr. Justice BLACK took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.

For dissenting opinions of Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER and Mr. Justice HARLAN, see 352 U.S. 518, 77 S.Ct. 459.

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, dissenting.

'The Federal Employers' Liability Act gives to railroad employees a somewhat liberalized right of recovery for injuries on the job. A great number of cases under the Act have been brought to the Supreme Court, many of them cases in which the court of appeals had set aside, on the evidence, verdicts for the employees. Despite the human appeal of these cases, Brandeis never allowed himself to regard them as the proper business of the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.'

Paul A. Freund, The Liberalism of Justice Brandeis, address at a meeting of the American Historical Association in St. Louis, December 28, 1956.

In so discharging his judicial responsibility, Mr. Justice Brandeis did not disclose an idiosyncrasy in a great judge. His attitude expressed respect for the standards formulated by the Court in carrying out the mandate of Congress regarding this Court's appellate jurisdiction in cases arising under the Federal Employers' Liability Act, 45 U.S.C.A. § 51 et seq. For he began his work on the Court¹ just after Congress had passed the Act of September 6, 1916, 39 Stat. 726, relieving the Court of its obligatory jurisdiction over Federal Employers' Liability Act decisions by the highest state courts and the Circuit Courts of Appeals. Mr. Justice Brandeis' general outlook on the formulation by the Supreme Court of the public law appropriate for an evolving society has more and more prevailed; his concept of the role of the Supreme Court in our judicial system, and his consequent regard for the bearing on the judicial product of what business comes to the Court and how the Court deals with it, have often been neglected in the name of 'doing justice' in individual cases. To him these were not technicalities, in the derogatory sense, for the conduct of judicial business. He deemed wise decisions on substantive law within the indispensable area of the Court's jurisdiction dependent on a limited volume of business and on a truly deliberative process.

One field of conspicuous disregard of these vital considerations is that large mass of cases under the Federal Employers' Liability Act in which the sole issue is the sufficiency of the evidence for submission to the jury.² For many years, I reluctantly voted on the merits of these negligence cases that had been granted review. In the last ten years, and more particularly within the past few years, as the Court has been granting more and more of these petitions, I have found it increasingly difficult to acquiesce in a practice that I regard as wholly incompatible with the certiorari policy embodied in the 1916 Act, the Judiciary Act of 1925, 43 Stat. 936, and the Rules formulated by the Court to govern certiorari jurisdiction for its own regulation and for the guidance of the bar. I have therefore felt compelled to vote to dismiss petitions for certiorari in such cases as improvidently granted without passing on the merits.³ In these cases I indicated briefly the reasons why I believed that this Court should not be reviewing decisions in which the sole issue is the sufficiency of the evidence for submission to the jury. In view of the increasing number of these cases that have been brought here for review—this dissent is to four decisions of the Court—and in view of the encouragement thereby given to continuing resort to this Court, I deem it necessary to enlarge upon the considerations that have guided me in the conviction that writs in this class of cases are 'improvidently granted.'⁴

At the outset, however, I should deal briefly with a preliminary problem. It is sometimes said that the 'integrity of the certiorari process' as expressed in the 'rule of four' (that is, this Court's practice of granting certiorari on the vote of four Justices) requires all the Justices to vote on the merits of a case when four Justices have voted to grant certiorari and no new factor emerges after argument and deliberation. There are two reasons why there can be no such requirement. Last Term, for example, the Court disposed of 1,361 petitions for certiorari. With such a volume of certiorari business, not to mention the remainder of the Court's business, the initial decision to grant a petition for certiorari must necessarily be based on a limited appreciation of the issues in a case, resting as it so largely does on the partisan claims in briefs of counsel. See Furness, Withy & Co. v. Yang-Tsze Ins. Ass'n, 242 U.S. 430, 434, 37 S.Ct. 141, 142, 61 L.Ed. 409; Southern Power Co. v. North Carolina Public Service Co., 263 U.S. 508, 509, 44 S.Ct. 164, 165, 68 L.Ed. 413. The Court does not, indeed it cannot and should not try to, give to the...