Walker v. Lykes Bros. SS Co.
| Decision Date | 10 January 1952 |
| Docket Number | Docket 22180.,No. 114,114 |
| Citation | 193 F.2d 772 |
| Parties | WALKER v. LYKES BROS. S. S. CO., Inc. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Benjamin B. Sterling and Herman N. Rabson, New York City, for plaintiff-appellee.
Tompkins, Boal & Tompkins and Arthur M. Boal, New York City, for defendant-appellant.
Before SWAN, Chief Judge, and L. HAND and AUGUSTUS N. HAND, Circuit Judges.
The defendant appeals from a judgment for the plaintiff, entered on the verdict of a jury in an action to recover damages for personal injuries suffered, while acting as master of one of the defendant's ships. The action was under the Jones Act, 46 U.S.C.A. § 688, and charged that the defendant had been negligent in allowing the plaintiff "to be struck by a steel filing cabinet, when a drawer thereof was negligently caused to open suddenly and with great force." The evidence was that there were two steel filing cabinets in the office of the plaintiff, each of which had four steel drawers, each drawer being held in place by a separate catch. The plaintiff testified that six of the eight catches were out of order and did not hold their drawers when the ship rolled, so that on occasion a drawer would roll out upon the floor. The catches presumably were in the same condition when the plaintiff took command of the ship at Staten Island, New York, on November 14, 1946, for he discovered the defects soon after she broke ground. They continued to be in disrepair until the accident on March 11, 1947, when, while he was passing beside the cabinet, the ship's roll dislodged one of the drawers and threw it against his shin, causing a wound which resulted in serious injury to his leg. His claim was that the faulty catches had come to the attention of others of the defendant's employees, who had neglected to mend them, and that this was actionable negligence within the Act. The defendant's position was that the plaintiff, as master, was himself charged with the duty of mending the catches; that he had ample chance to do so, but had failed, and that in any event he might have prevented the drawers from leaving the cabinet by locking them by devices which, however, the plaintiff swore were also out of order. The judge refused to direct a verdict for the defendant as requested and instructed the jury that they were to decide whether it was negligent to allow the ship to break ground with the catches as they were, and not to mend them before the accident. If they thought that the defendant had failed in this duty, they were then to ask themselves whether the plaintiff had by his own negligence "contributed to bringing about the result." "Did he take all such steps to prevent injury to himself and others aboard the ship * * * as a reasonably prudent and reasonably careful master would have taken under the circumstances?" If he did not, they must reduce his recovery in proportion to the gravity of his fault.
It has been the custom to speak of contributory negligence as a failure by the injured party to discharge a duty owed towards the wrongdoer; and, although it seems anomalous to think of the injured party as being under a duty not to expose himself to the chance that the wrongdoer may himself be delinquent, it makes no practical difference whether one adopts that form of words, or says that the duty of the wrongdoer does not extend to, or is modified in its scope in the case of, those who do not look out for themselves. We shall therefore accept the conventional rubric and think of contributory negligence as the breach of a duty to the wrongdoer. The important thing in situations like that at bar is to distinguish between such a duty, which the law imposes upon the injured person, regardless of any conscious assumption of a duty towards the wrongdoer, and a duty which the injured person has consciously assumed as a term of his employment. By "contributory negligence" which results in no more than reducing the amount of an employee's recovery, the Act means the first; the second is a bar to any recovery. This the Supreme Court has decided in a number of cases beginning in 1916 with Great Northern Railway Company v. Wiles, 240 U.S. 444, 36 S.Ct. 406, 60 L.Ed. 732;1 and it indicated no retreat from the doctrine in Rocco v. Lehigh Valley R. R. Co., 288 U.S. 275, 53 S.Ct. 343, 77 L.Ed. 743, although there it held that the plaintiff had not in fact violated any duty that he had assumed to his employer. The courts of appeal, ourselves included, have applied it in several cases.2 The theory apparently is that a momentary inattention to one's own safety — the kind of thing of which we are all guilty every day — should not be treated as so serious a fault as the breach of a duty assumed by the employee for the protection of others, although incidentally it is for his own benefit too. For this reason courts have imputed to Congress an intent to use the term, "contributory negligence," only in the first sense. In the case at bar, since the plaintiff was master of the ship, he fell within this doctrine, because it is well settled that the "duty of the master in the case of damage to the ship is to do all that can be done towards bringing the adventure to a successful termination; to repair the ship, if there be a reasonable prospect of doing so at an expense not ruinous;"3 just as it is his duty to care for the cargo,4 or not to overload the ship.5 Thus, if the plaintiff failed to repair the catches, although he was able to do so, his failure was not only "contributory negligence" in the first sense, but also a breach of his duty to the defendant which barred his recovery absolutely. It will be seen therefore that the case went to the jury under a mistaken view of the plaintiff's rights, when the judge told them to reduce his recovery in proportion to the gravity of his fault and did not tell them to bring in a verdict for the defendant, if the plaintiff was at fault. Hence, if the defendant had raised the point, the judgment could not stand. It did not raise the point, and for that reason we shall assume for argument that it may not raise it on this appeal. However, it did except to the adequacy of the instructions as the plaintiff's duties as master, and if these exceptions were well taken, the appeal must succeed. We think that at least two exceptions were well taken, and that when these are considered against the background of the evidence as a whole, the case should be retried.
In that part of his colloquial charge which discussed the issue of "contributory negligence," as we have said, the judge told the jury to...
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