120 Me. 457 | Me. | 1921
Mr. Justice Holmes, speaking for the court of which he is, in the case of The Blackheath, 195 U. S., 361, 49 Law Ed., 236, uses language worthy a sort of copyright. He says that ‘ (the precise scope of admiralty jurisdiction is not a matter of obvious principle or of very accurate history.”
The power of the Congress to legislate respecting maritime contracts, is paramount. This prerogative finds origin in that provision of the Federal Constitution enabling the mailing of all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution the powers vested by the supreme organic law in the government of the United States or its departments or officers. U. S. Con., Art. I, Sec. VIII. Among these powers are those of all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, (Idem. Art. Ill, Sec. II), and the regulation of commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, with uniformity. Idem. Art. I, Secs. VIII, IX. Exercising such control the first Congress conferred upon the District Courts of the United States “exclusive original cognizance of all civil causes of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, .... saving to suitors in all cases the right of a common law remedy where the common law is competent to give it.” The Judiciary Act, Sept. 24, 1789, Chap. 20, Sec. 9; 1 U. S. Stat., 73-77. The saving clause has been retained through all revisions of the statute down to the present time. 36 U. S. Stat., 1091; Comp. Stat., 1916, Sec. 991 (3). Before passing on, it may be well to remark, by way of reminder, that the Congress in
The State of Maine, repeating and amending an earlier law, (Laws of 1915, Chapter 295), has enacted a Workmen’s Compensation Act. Laws of 1919, Chapter 238. The statute defines the word “employee” as inclusive of every person in the service of another, other than casually, under any contract of employment whatsoever, excepting persons engaging in farm labor, as domestic servants, as masters of or seamen on vessels in interstate or foreign commerce, and officials of the State and its subdivisions, with exceptions, not material to be particularly stated here, regarding certain public officers and employees. The definition of “employer” is correspondingly comprehensive concerning those customarily employing five or more persons in the same business. The act is optional or elective. Acceptance of its provisions creates a contractual relationship between employer and employee. Mathias Gauthier’s Case, 120 Maine, 73; Mailman’s Case, 118 Maine, 172. Mutual acceptance by employer and employee of the provisions of the act adds a contract to the underlying contract of employment; the superadded contract having to do with the subject of the employer’s responsibility for disabling or fatal personal injuries to the employee, should such befall the latter in the course of his employment. Express assent, and a compliance on his part with stated preliminary requirements, to the approval of the commission erected to administer the act, will bring an employer within the circle of the law. Non-action, that is to say, a failure to give notice of a desire to be left outside, impliedly places the employee of an assenting employe]' there. If an employer, other than one employing domestic servants, or engaging in agriculture or logging, elect to remain without the act, and he be named defendant in tort for personal injuries sustained by his employee, or from death resulting therefrom, the doctrines of assumption of risk and fellow service and the defense of contributory negligence will be
In this situation of legal affairs, a vessel lay tied to a Portland wharf, in waters available to interstate commerce. Her freight was railroad ties. M. F. Donovan and Sons, Inc., a local stevedoring corporation, having contracted with the ship to discharge the cargo, hired the plaintiff, a longshoreman, to assist in the unloading. In performing his duties the plaintiff stood on a platform on the wharf. To this platform a sling, operated by a traveling derrick on the vessel, brought successive loads of the ties, from whence the ties were placed on a truck to be wheeled to another part of the wharf. On one of its journeys the sling struck the plaintiff; it knocked him from the platform to the wharf, and thereby incapacitated him temporarily for work. Donovan and Sons, Inc., was an assenting employer under the Workmen's Act. Its employee, deeming himself to be within that act, made application for the allowance of compensation. His application was granted. A Justice of this court entered statutory directed decree upon the award of the commission. Laws of 1919, Chap. 238, Sec. 34. Hight v. Manufacturing Co., 116 Maine,
Admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, as these terms are used in this country, extend not only to all things done upon and relating to the sea, to transactions relating to commerce and navigation, to damages and injuries upon the sea, and all maritime contracts, torts and injuries, (DeLovio v. Boit, 2 Gall., 398), but still beyond the high seas to waters navigable therefrom. The Genesee Chief, 12 How., 443, 13 Law Ed., 1058; The Hine v. Trevor, 4 Wall., 555, 563, 18 Law Ed., 451; The Eagle, 8 Wall., 15, 19 Law Ed., 365.
It seems almost superfluous to say that a state may neither broaden nor narrow the limits of maritime law and admiralty jurisdiction. The J. E. Rumbell, 148 U. S., 1, 37 Law Ed., 345; Steamboat Orleans v. Phoebus, 11 Pet., 175, 9 Law Ed., 677; Butler v. Boston & Savannah Steamboat Company, 130 U. S., 527, 32 Law Ed., 1017. State laws cannot exclude a maritime contract from the domain of admiralty jurisdiction; they cannot alter the limits of that jurisdiction. A state can only authorize the enforcement of rights by common law remedies, “or such remedies as are equivalent thereto.” The Lottawanna, 21 Wall., 558, 580, 22 Law Ed., 654. Under the Judiciary Act it is open to a suitor to proceed in rein in the admiralty or in personam in the same jurisdiction, or, at his election, in the stead of going into admiralty, he may resort to his common law remedy either in the federal or in the state courts. Hine v. Trevor, supra; The Belfast, 7 Wall., 624, 19 Law Ed., 266; Taylor v. Carryl, 20 How., 583, 15 Law Ed., 1028; Schoonmaker v. Gilmore, 102 U. S., 118, 26 Law Ed., 95; Manchester v. Massachusetts, 139 U. S., 240, 35 Law Ed., 159. Of course he may not for the one thing properly prevail in both jurisdictions. But personal suits on maritime contracts or for maritime torts are maintainable in state courts. If, as a general proposition, no remedy is sought against the vessel itself, the case is not within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal courts, but the state courts, administering common law remedies, have concurrent jurisdiction. 1 Cyc., 811; 1 C. J., 1253, Sec. 24. A suit in personam by a sailor for his wages is maintainable at common law, and there
“If the cause of action be one cognizable in admiralty, and the suit be in rem against the thing itself, though a monition be also issued to the owner, the proceeding is essentially one in admiralty. If, upon the other hand, the cause of action be not one of which a court of admiralty has jurisdiction, or if the suit be in personam against an individual defendant, with an auxiliary attachment against a particular thing, or against the property of the defendant in general, it is essentially a proceeding according to the course of the common law, and within the saving clause of the statute of a common law remedy.”
The exclusive jurisdiction granted by the Constitution to the United States courts has reference, as relating to the case at bar,
In the case in hand the plaintiff is not assuming to enforce a suit in rem against the vessel, nor is he attempting to prosecute a suit in personam against her master or her owner, nor to extend a contractual relationship born of state legislation beyond an immediate party, or the insurance carrier of the immediate party, to the contract. His attitude is that he and his employer, enjoying constitutional freedom to contract, voluntarily put aside rights and obligations otherwise vouchsafed them, and therefor substituted the new form of compensating industrial injuries which the Legislature of their State has provided. Having done this, and injury having befallen the plaintiff out of and in the course of his employment, he insists that this court make their contract to square with the demands of real justice and plain common sense, that his rights in the dual citizenship of State and Union may not be unjustly infringed, and that the remedial legislation out of which the contract sprang may be judged by what it achieves in satisfying the righteous demand of society for a justice that is exact, equal and full.
The presented situation, as we see it and understand it, is this. First, a contract between a stevedoring corporation and a vessel to
The prevailing opinion in the case of Knickerbocker Ice Company v. Stewart, 253 U. S., 149, 64 Law Ed., 834, is advanced by the defendants as of relation to the issue presented here.' The light to be got from that decision of the highest court in the land, speaking the last word on the question involved, is that the Congress exceeded its power to legislate in attempting, as against the owner of a barge, and in defiance of that owner’s will, to permit the application of a compulsory compensation law of New York to injuries sustained within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, by the owner’s employee; on the theory that such legislation is destructive of the essential harmony and uniformity that it was meant in the adoption of the Constitution that the federal government should provide and preserve in the rules concerning matters maritime. The decision must be accepted as conclusive. But that decision does not indicate the course of the present case. Under a compulsory statute the rights and Labilities of parties arbitrarily arise from the law. Under an elective statute they come into existence from contract. The distinction and the difference are too clear for exposition. And, what is the more, undoubtedly an independent contractor might be hable to his own employee, regardless of whether the vessel or her owner would be or not. A state legislature has no power to modify or abrogate the maritime law — that being of the law of the United States. Workmen v. New York, 179 U. S., 552, 45 Law Ed., 314. The Legislature of the State of Maine has not presumed to encroach or trench upon a power which the people of the United States conferred upon the nation. The Legislature has confined itself to the enactment of a law intended to operate only in those instances where its provisions are voluntarily contractually adopted, and operative solely by the procedure of the statute on which the adoption is bottomed. A contract founded on that law is of right entitled to the rights of a contract universally.
Doey v. Howland Company, 224 New York, 30, also relied upon in the brief of the defendants, involves the liability of an intermediate independent contractor to his employee, killed while at work on an ocean-going boat. The Industrial Commission of the State of New
Appeal dismissed.
Decree below affirmed.