Newburgh Land & Dock Company v. Texas Company

• Decision Date: 07 November 1955
• Docket Number: No. 67,Docket 23637.,67
• Citation: 227 F.2d 732
• Parties: NEWBURGH LAND & DOCK COMPANY v. The TEXAS COMPANY.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit

227 F.2d 732 (1955)

NEWBURGH LAND & DOCK COMPANY v. The TEXAS COMPANY.

No. 67, Docket 23637.

United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit.

Argued October 7, 1955.

Decided November 7, 1955.

Monroe J. Cahn, Warner Pyne, Pyne, Brush, Smith & Michelsen, Pyne, Lynch & Smith, New York City, Anthony V. Lynch, New York City, James A. Dilkes, Brooklyn, N. Y., of counsel, for appellant.

Louis Feren, Gair & Gair, New York City, Benjamin H. Siff, New York City, of counsel, for appellee.

Before HAND, MEDINA and LUMBARD, Circuit Judges.

HAND, Circuit Judge.

The defendant appeals from so much of a judgment as allowed interest upon the verdict of a jury from the time when the loss occurred instead of from the entry of the judgment. The issue arose in the following way. The plaintiff, a New York corporation, sued the defendant, a Delaware corporation, in the District Court to recover damages for injuries to its "floating dock," moored in the Hudson River at Newburgh, New York, caused by the negligent navigation of the defendant's tug and barges. The case was tried to a jury before Ryan, J., and the jury brought in a verdict of $22,500 for the plaintiff, from judgment on which the defendant has not appealed. After the jury had been discharged the plaintiff moved the court for the allowance of interest upon the verdict from the date of the collision, although it had not asked the judge to instruct the jury that in its discretion it might add interest, and it did not appear that the jury had done so. However, the judge held that interest was allowable as of course, and did not therefore need an award of the jury; and for that reason he added it at the rate of six per cent to the amount of the verdict, and directed judgment accordingly. He did this because the jurisdiction of the District Court was not founded upon the admiralty clause of the Constitution, but upon diverse citizenship; and, the action being therefore at law, the state rule should prevail. He further held that under the law of New York an award of interest followed automatically upon a verdict for unliquidated damages, not only in an action for personal injuries, but for injuries to property as well. As the appeal concerns only this part of the judgment it is confined to the following two questions. Does the law of New York or the maritime law control? If the second, what is the maritime law upon the subject?

We start with the premise that the wrong arose under the maritime law,¹ albeit, in the words of the plaintiff, it was an action of "trespass." This has been held to follow from the grant of jurisdiction in the Constitution, Art. III, § 2, cl. 1, to federal courts over "all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction,"² although as a new question, the conclusion does not seem to have been inevitable. This has, however, left in confusion what law determines the liability that arises from injuries occurring on the navigable waters of a state. It would have been possible to hold that the maritime law was of itself a definitive corpus juris that altogether displaced the state law; and in Steamboat Co. v. Chase, 16 Wall. 522, 21 L.Ed. 369, the Court possibly had in mind some such notion, for it decided the case as though the claim of the representative of a decedent, who had been drowned through the defendant's fault, arose under maritime law, and as though the only question was of the survival of the pre-existing claim. That position is no longer tenable;³ and indeed — with deference — it never was, except in so far as the representative is allowed to recover for the suffering of the decedent before he dies. Moreover, even if it had been true that the state statute only provided for the survival of the decedent's claim, the question would still remain why, if the maritime law is the only source of any right and liability, the state may modify so important an incident. When the question arose of the survival of a claim against the tortfeasor, the Court recognized⁴ that it could not be decided as a matter of procedure, or under § 1333(1) of Title 28 which saves "to suitors in all cases all other remedies to which they are otherwise entitled"; and so it held, 312 U.S. at pages 387, 388, 61 S.Ct. at page 691; that a claim arose under a state statute that must be recognized in a limitation proceeding in the admiralty. It was not, it said, "a principle of our maritime law that a court of admiralty must invariably refuse to recognize and enforce a liability which the State has established in dealing with a maritime subject. * * * With respect to maritime torts we have held that the State may modify or supplement the maritime law by creating liability which a court of admiralty will recognize and enforce when the state action is not hostile to the characteristic features of the maritime law or inconsistent with federal legislation." Indeed, before that decision even Holmes, J., when speaking for the minority in Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, at page 222, 37 S.Ct. 524, 531, 61 L.Ed. 1086, had conceded, "that in some cases different principles of liability would be applied as the suit should happen to be brought in a common law or admiralty court." Whether that was inconsistent with the rationale of his dissent, which rested upon the thesis that the maritime law applies to what occurs within the territorial boundaries of a state only so far as the state has not otherwise provided, we need not inquire; the point is that some exceptions to the paramountcy of the maritime law have always been recognized; and the case at bar turns upon whether the award of interest is among these. The niceties that have arisen as to when a workmen's compensation act will supersede liability for tort under the maritime law, serve to show the uncertainties that pervade the subject; but, as they have only an indirect bearing upon this case, we think it unnecessary to try to thread a way through the distinctions.⁵

So far as we can see, there is no clue in the opinions as to how far the state law may invade the maritime law to call up "the spectre of a lack of uniformity" which is thought to be so essential to that law. Here we have to do with the measure of damages, for interest is awarded on the theory that it is indemnity for the delay in paying for the loss; and it appears to...