Robins Dry Dock Repair Co v. Dahl

• Decision Date: 05 January 1925
• Docket Number: No. 316,316
• Citation: Robins Dry Dock Repair Co v. Dahl, 266 U.S. 449, 45 S.Ct. 157, 69 L.Ed. 372, 1925 AMC 182 (1925)
• Parties: ROBINS DRY DOCK & REPAIR CO. v. DAHL
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

266 U.S. 449

45 S.Ct. 157

69 L.Ed. 372

ROBINS DRY DOCK & REPAIR CO.

v DAHL.

No. 316.

Argued Dec. 4, 1924.

Decided Jan. 5, 1925.

Mr. A. G. Maul, of New York City, for plaintiff in error.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 450-451 intentionally omitted]Mr. Ralph G. Barclay, of Brooklyn, N. Y., for defendant in error.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 452-454 intentionally omitted]Mr. Justice McREYNOLDS delivered the opinion of the Court.

Defendant in error Dahl brought an action against the Robins Company—plaintiff in error—a New York corporation, in the Supreme Court, Kings County, New York, to recover damages for personal injuries.He alleged: That on February 2, 1920, while employed by the Robins Company and doing repair work on the steamer El Occident, then lying in navigable waters at Brooklyn, a plank scaffold on which he was walking or standing broke and caused him to fall into the hold.That he sustained serious injuries caused solely by and through negligence in that the company did not furnish a safe place to work and failed to provide a safe scaffold as required by the labor laws of the state of New York, but negligently and carelessly furnished an unsafe, inadequate and unsuitable scaffold and plank.

The trial court instructed the jury:

'This is what we call a maritime tort, an action in negligence that is governed by the maritime laws, the admiralty laws, the laws that pertain to navigable waters in this country.* * * The law permits even a maritime case, such as should ordinarily be brought in the United States court, to be tried in a state court.But the maritime law is applied, and those maritime laws are known by lawyers as the common law.* * *

'Under the common law the same rule applies in this case as the rules that I have laid down to you, that the burden is upon the plaintiff to prove that the defendant was negligent, and that he himself was free from any contributory negligence.In this case, however, comes a provision known as section 18 of the Labor Law, andsection 18 of the Labor Law[Consol. Laws, c. 31] reads as follows: 'A person employing or directing another to perform labor of any kind in the erection, repairing, altering or painting of a house, building or structure shall not furnish or erect, or cause to be furnished or erected for the performance of such labor, scaffolding, hoists, stays, ladders or other mechanical contrivances which are unsafe, unsuitable or improper, and which are not so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection to the life and limb of a person so employed or engaged.'

'The decisions hold that section 18 of the Labor Law does not make an employer, as we term him, the 'master,' in this casethe defendant, an insurer of the scaffold—and this plank within the meaning of the law is a scaffold—it does not make the master an insurer of the safety of the scaffold under all conditions; it requires the scaffold to be so safe as to give proper protection to the workmen engaged in their duty.However careful the master, he is responsible unless the scaffold is in fact a proper one, proper to protect the workman in the performance of his work.No law of the state can modify or affect the rights of workmen who are operating under the maritime law.And it has been held that this section 18 of the Labor Law does not modify or affect the law, but may be read in conjunction with the law.

'And as I understand the law to be, in determining in this case whether the defendant was negligent—for the plaintiff must still prove that the defendant was negligent—you must have in mind that there was in existence in the state a law which imposed upon the defendant the burden and the necessity of providing a scaffold that was proper for the workman to work upon.And in this case, in the light of that law, you must determine whether the defendant knowing the law, as it was called upon to know it, acted negligently, and whether or not the plaintiff has...