United States v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co.

• Citation: 64 F. Supp. 289
• Decision Date: 30 January 1946
• Docket Number: No. 271.,271.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Eastern District of North Carolina
• Parties: UNITED STATES v. ATLANTIC COAST LINE R. CO.

64 F. Supp. 289

UNITED STATES v. ATLANTIC COAST LINE R. CO.

No. 271.

District Court, E. D. North Carolina, Wilmington Division.

January 30, 1946.

Charles F. Rouse, U. S. Atty., of Kinston, N. C., for plaintiff.

Thomas W. Davis and M. V. Barnhill, Jr., both of Wilmington, N.C., for defendant.

GILLIAM, District Judge.

This cause was heard by consent at New Bern, N. C., on the 10th of November, 1945, without a jury, upon an agreed statement of facts which is set out in the record. The full stipulation will not be here included, but the pertinent facts, briefly stated, are as follows:

In November, 1943, Sgt. Edgar A. Wiles, Jr., of the Army of the United States, was fatally injured through the negligence of the defendant and settlement of the defendant's liability for the wrongful death under the North Carolina Statute, G.S. §§ 28-173, 28-174, was reached with his administrator, the defendant taking a release for "all claims, rights and causes of action" on account of the fatal injuries "as well as for all claims for nurses, medical, doctors and hospital bills, services and expenses, and any and all other claims directly or indirectly growing out of said action". The soldier survived his injuries for a period of about two hours and within this period was furnished certain nursing care and hospitalization, the agreed reasonable value of which was paid by the plaintiff under the express obligation imposed upon it by law. This action by plaintiff is for recovery of the amount so paid and the plaintiff bases its claims for recovery upon the principle of the common law, which in general terms permitted the master in certain circumstances to maintain an action against a wrongdoer to recover damages on account of loss of the services of his servant resulting from injury to the servant or interference with the relationship between master and servant.

A reading of the early textbooks and cases readily brings one to the conclusion that this principle, which should be considered as an exception to the general rule that a wrongful injury to A, by which he is prevented from fulfilling his contractual obligation to B, gives no right of action to B, in its inception applied only where the wrongdoer acted maliciously or with notice, and that even under such conditions only to cases involving menial servants or domestics and analogous situations involving an apprentice, a minor child, or a wife. Such conclusion is supported by Blackstone's Commentaries (1803) at page 428: "Let us, lastly, see how strangers may be affected by this relation of master and servant. * * * A master also may bring an action against any man for beating or maiming his servant, but in such case he must assign, as a special reason for so doing, his own damage by the loss of his services. * * * Also, if any person do hire or retain my servant being in my service, for which the servant departeth from me and goeth to serve the other, I may have an action for damages against both the new master and the servant, or either of them; but if the new master did not know that he is my servant no action lies; * * * The reason and foundation, upon which all of this doctrine is built, seems to be the property that every man has in the service of his domestics acquired by contract, and purchased by giving them wages."

In Holdsworth's History of English Law, 2d Ed. vol. 8, p. 429, it is said: "On the remedies given by the law for the abduction of a servant I have already spoken. They rested at the bottom on the idea that the master had a quasi proprietary interest in his servant's services; and that idea is connected with the status of a servant which originated in the rules of law applicable to villein status."

In Diamond, Law of Master and Servant, (1932) at page 238, referring to the master's claims for loss of services resulting from tort, seduction and induced breach of contract, the author writes: "The above actions are forms of the old actions of trespass * * * for depriving the master of the service of his servant. They date from the time when the service was a status and and the servant, in a sense, a member of the family or household * * *."

There are other texts which seem to uphold the conclusion reached.

The plaintiff, as it appears, does not seriously deny that the early rule was substantially as above set out, but insists that it has been enlarged and extended so that under the modern rule the master is permitted to recover though the servant be of a higher class than a menial one — a domestic infra moenia, and in fact more than this, that a right of action per quod servitium amisit does not depend upon the existence of a contract of service but upon a right of one person to the service of another, where it appears that the plaintiff had the right to the services either arising by contract or some status, and where the plaintiff had the right to control the service of the person injured, whether the person was villein or otherwise; that is, where the plaintiff had the right to give orders and have them obeyed.

In support of this position the plaintiff cites American Jurisprudence, vol. 35, p. 958, where the author says: "The early common law accorded a remedy only in the case of menial servants — domestic infra moenia, but under the modern rule it is not necessary, it seems, that the servant should have been working for wages in order to entitle the master to recover for the injury."

An examination of the cases cited in connection with the above statement will lead to the conclusion that they do not support the broad terms used by the author, and with the exception of two cases, both of which will be hereafter referred to, to-wit: Attorney General v. Valle Jones, 1935, 2 K.B.D. 209, and United States of America v. Standard Oil Company of California, D.C.1945, 60 F.Supp. 807, which is based upon the Valle Jones case, no authorities have been cited to justify the conclusion that the trend of the Court's decisions has been to extend and enlarge the original common law principle; while the very logical and reasonable rule of law which is designed to redress only the proximate and direct consequence of wrongful acts and several well considered cases within and without the United States support the view that there should not be and that there has not been such enlargement and extension of this principle.

Before referring to the decisions which seem to uphold such view, attention is called to the pertinent observation of Judge Coleridge in a dissenting opinion in Lumley v. Gye, 2 El. & Bl. 749, which upheld recovery for a malicious interruption of the relation between master and servant, as follows: "But I mention this case now as showing how far Courts of Justice may be led if they allow themselves, in the pursuit of perfectly complete remedies for all wrongful acts, to transgress the bounds which our law, in a wise consciousness as I conceive of its limited powers, has imposed on itself, of redressing only the proximate and direct consequence of wrongful acts."

Again in City of Philadelphia v. Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co., 337 Pa. 1, 10 A. 2d 434, 435, to be hereafter referred to and in which recovery was denied under circumstances similar to the circumstances of this case, we find the following observation: "It is extremely doubtful whether such a right of action should be recognized under modern conditions. It had its beginnings at a time when the relation of master and servant was totally different from that of today."

Also in Pollock on Torts, 14th Ed., p. 55: "Both of these very learned opinions (in the case of Admiralty Commissioners v. S. S. Amerika, infra) indicate a feeling that a master's action for loss of services is itself no better than a surviving archaism in our modern law and does not deserve encouragement."

As above stated, the two cases upon which the plaintiff mainly relies are Attorney General v. Valle Jones, 1935, 2 K.B. 209, an English case, and United States of America v. Standard Oil Company of California, supra, a case decided last year by a District Court of California. The decision in the California case is made to rest on the Valle Jones case, which is the only case cited in the text of the opinion and these two decisions, if accepted, would determine this controversy in favor of the plaintiff. The facts in the Valle Jones case, which was decided in 1935, were as follows: Two members of the Royal Air Force were injured through the negligence of the defendant and the Crown was permitted to recover for wages paid them during their disability and for expenses of hospital and medical treatment, basing the claim upon the old common...