Smith v. Guerrant

• Decision Date: 24 September 1968
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 68-G-14.
• Parties: R. E. SMITH, Plaintiff, v. W. F. GUERRANT and Guerrant Construction Company, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of Texas

290 F. Supp. 111

R. E. SMITH, Plaintiff, v. W. F. GUERRANT and Guerrant Construction Company, Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 68-G-14.

United States District Court S. D. Texas, Galveston Division.

September 24, 1968.

Stillwell & Brown, Houston, Tex., for plaintiff.

Jean E. Hosey, Galveston, Tex., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM AND OPINION

NOEL, District Judge.

Plaintiff engaged defendant's crane to lift his Hyster forklift from a jetty up on a dock. The crane was positioned on the dock, and its tackle attached to the forklift. The forklift was boomed up, but as the crane was swinging it over to the dock, the boom collapsed, dropping the forklift into the waters of the Galveston Yacht Basin. Plaintiff filed this action in admiralty, alleging that the tort was maritime because it was consummated in the water. Defendant cross-complained for the damage to its crane, but plaintiff moved to dimiss the cross-complaint for want of jurisdiction, arguing that because the crane was injured before any part of it struck the water, the tort alleged by defendant was outside the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. On its own motion, the court then questioned jurisdiction of the original complaint as well. Neither party has alleged a connection between the alleged torts and maritime commerce or navigation; hence if locality alone is insufficient to sustain admiralty tort jurisdiction, both claims must be dismissed. The issue, therefore, is to choose between the strict locality test of admiralty tort jurisdiction and the maritime connection test.

The strict locality test has been stated so frequently that courts often invoke it as a general rule,¹ but the commentators note that jurisdiction has never been upheld solely on the basis of locality.² Whenever a court has found no maritime connection, it has refused to take jurisdiction.³ When asked to hold that locality alone would support jurisdiction in admiralty, the Supreme Court instead found a longshoreman's work a maritime activity and reserved the broader question.⁴

In this case the broad question must be answered, for the tort claim here is wholly unrelated "to maritime service, to navigation, and to commerce on navigable waters."⁵ Plaintiff's Hyster forklift, while unattended, ran off a wharf in the Galveston Yacht Basin and came to rest on a finger pier or walkway. Defendant's crane was engaged to lift the forklift and place it back on the dock. The crane's boom collapsed, dropping the forklift into the waters of the harbor. Plaintiff's claim is for water damage. No relation to maritime concerns is alleged, and the Court finds that none exists. That the forklift was dropped in the water and not on the dock or the finger pier was fortuitous. If a maritime connection is needed to sustain jurisdiction in admiralty, plaintiff's claim must be dismissed.

Jurisdiction in this action is premised on 28 U.S.C. § 1333 and article III, § 2 of the United States Constitution.⁶ For there to be jurisdiction, of course, this case must be within the power conferred by statute, and the statute must be constitutional.⁷ Here it is unnecessary to determine the breadth of the constitutional provision, for the answer to the preliminary question is dispositive. The two questions are not the same, and cases construing the constitutional provision are not directly applicable to this question of statutory construction. Although the words of the statute and those in the Constitution are almost identical, the two provisions need not be construed alike, for they were adopted by different bodies for different purposes.⁸ The clause in the Constitution was adopted by the Convention to permit the national government to maintain the uniformity of the existing maritime law.⁹ The jurisdictional statute, by contrast, is less sweeping. While the first Congress repeated the words in the Constitution when it conferred exclusive jurisdiction on the district courts in admiralty and maritime cases, it added a savings clause to preserve "the traditionally exercised concurrent jurisdiction of the state courts in admiralty matters."¹⁰ Thus its concern encompassed more than just uniformity. Moreover, however the first Congress may have viewed this jurisdictional statute, the 80th Congress in revising the Judicial Code cannot have considered § 1333 the exclusive basis for federal admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. Six days before the Judicial Code was enacted Congress passed the Extension of Admiralty Jurisdiction Act.¹¹ This statute, which overruled The Ply-mouth¹² and expanded the admiralty jurisdiction to encompass injuries done by vessels to land structures, was codified not to § 1333 but to 46 U.S.C. § 740.¹³ Congress thus did not consider § 1333 as exhausting the constitutional admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. Like other jurisdictional statutes, § 1333 may therefore be strictly construed, so long as the purposes that underlay its enactment are not thwarted. "It is a statute, not a Constitution, we are expounding."¹⁴

These purposes have already been suggested. The first Congress created the district courts and gave them exclusive jurisdiction in admiralty cases to permit them to oversee the uniform development of maritime law.¹⁵ At the same time, it recognized that uniformity is not essential in all cases technically within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; it therefore provided that cases traditionally litigable under the common law might be tried, at the option of the claimant, in either forum. Uniformity is desirable where the litigation and the issues to be resolved are related in some fashion to maritime transportation, the industry whose special problems created a need for a specialized branch of the law.¹⁶ Disputes like the present one, which is only incidentally related to navigable waters and wholly unconnected with maritime commerce, can be litigated in state courts under the diverse rules of state law without affecting maritime endeavors. The basis for the special grant of admiralty jurisdiction is absent here.

Thus it is appropriate to restrict the scope of § 1333 by requiring a maritime connection. Because cases lacking such a connection are outside the purpose of the statute, the statute should be strictly construed to exclude them.

The case law is not inconsistent with the above conclusion. The cases in which jurisdiction was declined because the tort occurred on land¹⁷ are distinguishable, for they involve the converse of the strict locality test at issue here. In other cases, the court has invoked the strict locality test although the dispute before it was manifestly related to maritime activities.¹⁸ Such decisions are weak authority for a strict locality test. In several recent cases the court has purported to rely on the strict locality test, but then proceeded to find some relation between the claim before it and maritime commerce or navigation.¹⁹ Whenever a court has expressly found such a relation to be absent, it has dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction.²⁰

Two other considerations suggest that from the standpoint of judicial administration it is wise to reject the strict locality standard of admiralty jurisdiction. It is an arbitrary standard, often honored in its breach where to apply it would be to restrict the admiralty jurisdiction. Long ago maritime contracts were excepted from the strict locality rules that crippled the English admiralty; for at least 150 years the admiralty contract jurisdiction has been a function not of locality, but of the maritime nature of the subject matter of the contract.²¹ Similarly, the admiralty has entertained suits over torts that occurred on land but were clearly related to maritime commerce or navigation.²² On both of these fronts the admiralty jurisdiction has expanded landward to include many maritime matters that did not wholly arise on navigable waters. Requiring a maritime connection in all tort cases would complement these trends by making the jurisdictional issue simpler to resolve and by making the resolution less arbitrary.

If the presence of a maritime connection becomes both a necessary and a sufficient condition for invoking the admiralty jurisdiction, the existence of jurisdiction will be fairly predictable and relatively easy to determine. Such "empty distinctions"²³ as whether a quasi-contractual claim sounds more in tort than in contract,²⁴ whether a tort was consummated on land or in the water,²⁵ and whether an object attached to the ocean floor is an extension of land or an aid to navigation²⁶ will no longer be before the court. The jurisdictional issue will be confined to determining whether the claim is maritime. While this may at times prove difficult,²⁷ the court may refer to the purposes for which the federal admiralty and maritime jurisdiction was created. Difficult distinctions cannot be avoided if the admiralty jurisdiction is to be kept within its proper bounds,²⁸ but irrelevant and complex distinctions should be discarded in favor of useful and straightforward ones.

Moreover, an admiralty jurisdiction that depended entirely on the existence of a maritime connection would enable parties to try all facets of a single controversy in a single lawsuit. Under present law this cannot be done. In related tort and contract claims, for example, a single issue, negligence, is often fundamental to the proof of both causes of action. Yet if tort jurisdiction is a function of locality, but contract jurisdiction is a function of the maritime nature of the subject matter, both claims cannot be tried in a single forum. Thus in Weinstein v. Eastern Airlines, Inc.,²⁹ a case arising out of an airplane crash, the Third Circuit felt it should retain jurisdiction of the tort claims but dismiss the claims for breach of contract. The incident that gave rise to the instant case also illustrates the irrationality of present law. The complaint is for damage to a forklift that was dropped into the water when the boom on a...