Stewart v. Pacific Steam Navigation Co.

• Decision Date: 02 May 1924
• Citation: 3 F.2d 329
• Parties: STEWART v. PACIFIC STEAM NAVIGATION CO.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

3 F.2d 329 (1924)

STEWART v. PACIFIC STEAM NAVIGATION CO.

District Court, S. D. New York.

May 2, 1924.

Silas B. Axtell, of New York City, for libelant.

Kirlin, Woolsey, Campbell, Hickox & Keating, of New York City, for respondent.

LEARNED HAND, District Judge.

Only one point is raised on this motion to set aside the service of the summons, and that is that under section 20 of the Act of March 4, 1915, as amended by section 33, Act June 5, 1920, c. 250, 41 Stat. 1007 (Comp. St. Ann. Supp. 1923, § 8337a) commonly called the Jones Act, no action can be brought against a corporation organized outside the United States. This position is taken, not because of any intimation in the general language which creates the right of action, for concededly it is not so limited, but because of the sentence with which the section concludes, which reads as follows: "Jurisdiction in such actions shall be under the court of the district in which the defendant employer resides or in which his principal office is located."

The Supreme Court, in the case of The Allianca (Panama R. Co. v. Johnson, 264 U. S. 375, 44 S. Ct. 391, 68 L. Ed. 748, 1924 A. M. C. 551, said very aptly that this sentence was not happily worded, and the infelicity of the language causes the question in this case, as well as in that. In the case I have just cited, the sentence is construed, as obviously it must be construed, not as a question of the affirmative bestowal of jurisdiction, but merely as a question of venue, and I must therefore construe it in the same sense here. The general bestowal of jurisdiction is to be found in the right sentence, the long one; it lays down what the right shall be, and against whom it shall exist. As I have already said, this language is general. There is no indication of any purpose to limit it to United States corporations, and it would be highly unreasonable to impute any such purpose to Congress, for the result would be, not only to deprive American seamen of the protection which the act was meant to give them when serving on foreign ships, but to give advantage to such ships as against American ships. We all know that the purpose of Congress was directly the opposite.

That being very clearly the main purpose of the act, how am I to interpret the last sentence, which confers jurisdiction? It seems to me that this is very easy in the case of a foreign corporation. The phrase "in which its principal office is located" clearly means in which the principal...