Pryor v. American President Lines, 74-1699

• Decision Date: 17 March 1975
• Docket Number: No. 74-1699,74-1699
• Citation: 520 F.2d 974
• Parties: Raymond E. PRYOR, Personal Representative of the Estate of Marion L. Stephens, Deceased, Appellant, v. AMERICAN PRESIDENT LINES, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 974

520 F.2d 974

Raymond E. PRYOR, Personal Representative of the Estate of Marion L. Stephens, Deceased, Appellant, v. AMERICAN PRESIDENT LINES, Appellee.

No. 74-1699.

United States Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit.

Argued Feb. 5, 1975.

Decided March 17, 1975.

Joseph F. Lentz, Jr., Baltimore, Md., for appellant.

John T. Ward, Baltimore, Md. (Ober, Grimes & Shriver, Baltimore, Md., on brief), for appellee.

Before HAYNSWORTH, Chief Judge, and CRAVEN and WIDENER, Circuit Judges.

CRAVEN, Circuit Judge:

We heard this case on February 5, 1975, and released our slip opinion on March 17, 1975. We held that if defectively packaged goods in a railroad car on a pier are released by action of a ship's winch so as to cause injury, there exists a sufficiently close causal relationship between operation of the ship's gear and the injury to invoke the admiralty doctrine of unseaworthiness. On petition for rehearing by American President Lines, we withdraw our prior opinion. We are now convinced that the law of admiralty has no application to the facts of this case, and that the claim of unseaworthiness is therefore untenable. For reasons that will be more fully stated, the decision of the district court dismissing the complaint will be affirmed.

I.

On September 12, 1969, Marion L. Stephens, a longshoreman employed by the Nacirema Operating Company, was injured while helping load coils of steel wire from a railroad gondola car onto the S. S. PRESIDENT PIERCE at the Pennwood Wharf in Baltimore. The coils had been stowed in the gondola car in three rows, two on bottom and the third on top of those two in pyramid formation. Stephens' job was to run a wire through the center holes of several coils and hook the eyes at the ends of the wire to the ship's cargo cable so that the ship's winch could lift the coils on board. He allegedly was injured when a coil of wire that he had not yet touched, sprang open just as the coils next to it were being lifted away by the winch. It is claimed that the jagged end of the coil caught Stephens' trouser leg and knocked him off the gondola car.

Stephens sued the shipowner, American President Lines, alleging unseaworthiness and negligence. He invoked the admiralty jurisdiction of the district court, 28 U.S.C. § 1333(1); see Fed.R.Civ.P. 9(h), but also alleged diversity of citizenship, which the defendant specifically admitted. Since the ad damnum was $50,000 the district court had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332 as well.

The case proceeded on the admiralty side of the court and was tried to the judge without a jury. The only evidence on the circumstances of the injury was Stephens' pre-trial deposition, introduced because Stephens had since died from an unrelated accident. At the close of plaintiff's case the defendant shipowner moved for dismissal under Rule 41(b). The district court, in an oral opinion, determined that it had admiralty jurisdiction, but found that the facts showed neither negligence nor unseaworthiness and dismissed the case. It found no evidence whatsoever of negligence, and plaintiff has not pressed that theory on appeal. As to unseaworthiness, it found no indication of a defect in the ship's gear and nothing unsafe about the plan of operation, and failed to find anything wrong with the coils. Further, the court stated that even had there been shown "some defective condition of the cargo, such as improper banding of the coils, or nonexistent banding of the coils," the unseaworthiness claim would still fail for lack of proof that the ship had "accepted" and thus become responsible for the coil that injured Stephens.

II.

A federal maritime claim may be asserted in federal district court either under § 1333, or, in consequence of the "saving to suitors" clause of that section, based on diversity of citizenship. ¹ Because defendant admitted facts in the court below that showed diversity jurisdiction, we find it unnecessary to address the question of whether the court was correct in determining that it had jurisdiction under § 1333. For, as the Supreme Court noted in Victory Carriers, Inc. v. Law, 404 U.S. 202, 204, 92 S.Ct. 418, 420, 30 L.Ed.2d 383 (1971), "under either section the claim that a ship or its gear was unseaworthy would be rooted in federal maritime law." The dispositive question, therefore, is not jurisdictional but whether maritime law applies to this claim.

The application of federal maritime law to alleged torts, whether negligence or unseaworthiness, has been governed historically by the locality of the harm. Victory Carriers, supra, at 205, 92 S.Ct. 418 and cases cited at n. 2; but cf. Executive Jet Aviation, Inc. v. City of Cleveland, 409 U.S. 249, 93 S.Ct. 493, 34 L.Ed.2d 454 (1972) (suggesting that some relationship to traditional maritime activity must be shown in addition to "maritime locality"). Maritime law has been applied, in general, only to torts occurring on navigable waters, with the result in the case of injuries occurring on or about docked ships that "(t)he gangplank has served as a rough dividing line between the state and maritime regimes." Victory Carriers, supra, at 207, 92 S.Ct. at 422.

The reach of federal maritime law depends upon the content of Art. III, § 2, cl. 1 of the Constitution, and must be defined by the courts as arbiters of that document. But the Supreme Court, deferring to the Congress, see Executive Jet, supra, at 272-74, 93 S.Ct. 493; Victory Carriers,supra, at 211-12, 216, 92 S.Ct. 418, has upheld congressional extensions so long as they do not transgress those ultimate "boundaries to the maritime law and admiralty jurisdiction which inhere in those subjects and cannot be altered by legislation." Panama R. R. v. Johnson, 264 U.S. 375, 386, 44 S.Ct. 391, 394, 68 L.Ed. 748 (1924); see also The Propeller Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh, 53 U.S. (12 How.) 443, 453-58, 13 L.Ed. 1058 (1851). ² Thus, although the Court had earlier refused to permit recovery in admiralty for damage caused by a ship to persons or property on shore, see Martin v. West, 222 U.S. 191, 32 S.Ct. 42, 56 L.Ed. 159 (1911); The Troy, 208 U.S. 321, 28 S.Ct. 416, 52 L.Ed. 512 (1908); The Plymouth, 70 U.S. (3 Wall.) 20, 18 L.Ed. 125 (1866), it allowed recovery for such an injury after Congress had passed the Admiralty Extension Act of 1948, 46 U.S.C. § 740, which states:

The admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States shall extend to and include all cases of damage or injury, to person or property caused by a vessel on navigable water, notwithstanding that such damage or injury be done or consummated on land.

In Gutierrez v. Waterman Steamship Corp., 373 U.S. 206, 83 S.Ct. 1185, 10 L.Ed.2d 297 (1963), the Court held that a longshoreman on the dock could recover on a claim of unseaworthiness when he slipped on loose beans that had spilled from defective bags as they were being unloaded from a ship. See Victory Carriers, supra, at 210-11, 92 S.Ct. 418 (interpreting the holding of Gutierrez as dependent upon the Admiralty Extension Act); 7A J. Moore, Federal Practice P .325 (Supp.1973), at 106. Thus, because Congress had acted within the "boundaries . . . which inhere in" the maritime law, supra, the maritime law extended in Gutierrez to the shoreward side of the gangplank.

In Victory Carriers, however, the Court refused to permit a maritime suit by a longshoreman injured during the loading process when the overhead protection rack of his forklift, owned by his stevedoring company, came loose and fell on him. The Court stated that "in the absence of congressional guidance," 404 U.S. at 204, 92 S.Ct. at 421, maritime law would not be extended any farther beyond the gangplank than is authorized by the Admiralty Extension Act, and specifically that it would not cover any injury to a longshoreman simply because he was engaged in the process of loading a ship. Id. at 211, 214 & n. 14, 92 S.Ct. 418.

After Gutierrez and Victory Carriers it is clear that maritime law does not reach an injury occurring off a ship that is being loaded or unloaded, i. e., shoreward of the gangplank, unless the ship or some appurtenance of it ³ causes the accident within the meaning of the Admiralty Extension Act. Since the injury to Stephens in the instant case did not occur on the ship, the applicability of maritime law depends upon whether his injury was "caused" by the ship or its appurtenances.

Maritime law may conceivably be invoked upon either one of two theories: (a) the action of the ship's winch on the coil "caused" the injury, or (b) the defectively packaged coil had become ship's cargo so that its springing open was imputable to the ship, and in that sense the ship "caused" the injury.

What is the meaning of the word "caused" appearing in the Admiralty Extension Act? If "but for" causation is enough, ⁴ the action of the ship's winch in lifting neighboring coils to allow the coil that injured Stephens to spring open would invoke maritime law. If, on the other hand, the word means "proximate cause" the involvement of the winch does not support application of maritime law, for the only permissible inference from the facts is that the proximate cause of the injury, assuming it was not simply an accident, was some defect in the banding of the springing coil not attributable to the ship; nothing indicated improper handling of the winch.

The Fifth Circuit has, we think, adopted a "proximate cause" construction in two cases. In Kent v. Shell Oil Co., 286 F.2d 746 (5th Cir. 1961), the court held that maritime law did not apply when a truck driver was injured by oil field pipe that unexpectedly rolled off his truck bed onto him as he stood between his truck and the barge onto which the pipe was to be loaded. At the time of his injury the driver was trying to realign two displaced timber skids, along which the pipes were to be rolled from truck to barge. The court stated:

There was . . . absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anything done on the...