Lead Opinion
delivered the opinion of the Court.
On April 13, 1992, water from the Chicago River poured into a freight tunnel running under the river and thence into the basements of buildings in the downtown Chicago Loop. Allegedly, the flooding resulted from events several months earlier, when respondent Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company had used a crane, sitting on a barge in the river next to a bridge, to drive piles into the riverbed above the tunnel. The issue before us is whether a court of the United States has admiralty jurisdiction to determine and limit the extent of Great Lakes’s tort liability. We hold this suit to be within federal admiralty jurisdiction.
The complaint, together with affidavits subject to no objection, alleges the following facts. In 1990, Great Lakes bid on a contract with petitioner city of Chicago to replace wooden pilings clustered around the piers of several bridges spanning the Chicago River, a navigable waterway within the meaning of The Daniel Ball,
In August and September 1991, Great Lakes replaced the pilings around the piers projecting into the river and supporting the Kinzie Street Bridge. After towing the crane-carrying barge into position near one of the piers, Great Lakes’s employees secured the barge to the riverbed with spuds, or long metal legs that project down from the barge and anchor it. The workers then used the crane on the barge to pull up old pilings, stow them on the other barge, and drive new pilings into the riverbed around the piers. About seven months later, an eddy formed in the river near the bridge as the collapsing walls or ceiling of a freight tunnel running under the river opened the tunnel to river water, which flowed through to flood buildings in the Loop.
After the flood, many of the victims brought actiоns in state court against Great Lakes and the city of Chicago, claiming that in the course of replacing the pilings Great Lakes had negligently weakened the tunnel structure, which Chicago (its owner) had not properly maintained. Great Lakes then brought this lawsuit in the United States District Court, invoking federal admiralty jurisdiction. Count I of the complaint seeks the protection of the Limitation of Vessel Owner’s Liability Act (Limitation Act), 46 U. S. C. App. § 181 et seq., a statute that would, in effect, permit the admi
The city, joined by petitioner Jerome B. Grubart, Inc., one of the state-court plaintiffs, filed a motion to dismiss this suit for lack of admiralty jurisdiction. Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 12(b)(1). The District Court granted the motion, the Sevеnth Circuit reversed, Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. v. Chicago,
II
The parties do not dispute the Seventh Circuit’s conclusion that jurisdiction as to Counts II and III (indemnity and contribution) hinges on jurisdiction over the Count I claim. See
A
A federal court’s authority to hear cases in admiralty flows initially from the Constitution, which “extend[s]” federal judicial power “to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction.” U. S. Const., Art. Ill, § 2. Congress has embodied that power in a statute giving federal district courts “original jurisdiction . . . of. . . [a]ny civil case of admiralty or maritime jurisdiction ... .” 28 U. S. C. § 1333(1).
The traditional test for admiralty tort jurisdiction asked only whether the tort occurred on navigable waters. If it did, admiralty jurisdiction followed; if it did not, admiralty
This latter rule was changed in 1948, however, when Congress enacted the Extension of Admiralty Jurisdiction Act, 62 Stat. 496. The Act provided that
“[t]he admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States shall extend to and include all cases of damage or injury, to person or property, caused by a vessel on navigable water, notwithstanding that such damage or injury be done or consummated on land.” 46 U. S. C. App. §740.
The purpose of the Act was to end concern over the sometimes confusing line between land and water, by investing admiralty with jurisdiction over “all cases” where the injury was caused by a ship or other vessel on navigable water, even if such injury occurred on land. See, e. g., Gutierrez v. Waterman S. S. Corp.,
After this congressional modification to gather the odd case into admiralty, the jurisdictional rule was qualified again in three decisions of this Court aimed at keeping a different class of odd cases out. In the first case, Executive Jet, supra, tort claims arose out of the wreck of an airplane that collided with a flock of birds just after takeoff on a do
The second decision, Foremost Ins. Co. v. Richardson,
“[t]he potential disruptive impact [upon maritime commerce] of a collision between boats on navigable waters, when coupled with the traditional concern that admiralty law holds for navigation ...,” id., at 675.
In the most recent of the trilogy, Sisson v. Ruby,
After Sisson, then, a party seeking to invoke federal admiralty jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U. S. C. § 1333(1) over a tort claim must satisfy conditions both of location and of connection with maritime activity. A court applying the location test must determine whether the tort occurred on navigable water or whether injury suffered on land was caused by a vessel on navigable water. 46 U. S. C. Aрp. § 740. The connection test raises two issues. A court, first, must “assess the general features of the type of incident involved,”
B
The location test is, of course, readily satisfied. If Great Lakes caused the flood, it must have done so by weakening the structure of the tunnel while it drove in new pilings or removed old ones around the bridge piers. The weakening presumably took place as Great Lakes’s workers lifted and replaced the pilings with a crane that sat on a barge stationed in the Chicago River. The place in the river where the barge sat, and from which workers directed the crane, is in the “navigable waters of the United States.” Escanaba Co.,
Because the injuries suffered by Grubart and the other flood victims were caused by a vessel on navigable water, the location enquiry would seem to be at an end, “notwithstanding that such damage or injury [was] done or consummated on land.” 46 U. S. C. App. §740. Both Grubart and Chicago nonetheless ask us to subject the Extension Act to limitations not apparent from its text. While they concede that the Act refers to “all cases of damage or injury,” they argue that “all” must not mean literally every such case, no matter how great the distance between the vessel’s tortious activity and the resulting harm. They contend that, to be
The demerits of this argument lie not only in its want of textual support for its nonremoteness rule, but in its disregard of a less stringent but familiаr proximity condition tied to the language of the statute. The Act uses the phrase “caused by,” which more than one Court of Appeals has read as requiring what tort law has traditionally called “proximate causation.” See, e. g., Pryor v. American President Lines,
The city responds by saying that, as a praсtical matter, the use of proximate cause as a limiting jurisdictional principle would undesirably force an admiralty court to investigate the merits of the dispute at the outset of a case when it determined jurisdiction.
C
We now turn to the maritime connection enquiries, the first being whether the incident involved was of a sort with the potential to disrupt maritime commerce. In Sisson, we described the features of the incident in general terms as “a fire on a vessel docked at a marina on navigable waters,” id., at 363, and determined that such an incident “plainly satisfied]” the first maritime connection requirement, ibid., because the fire could have “spread to nearby commercial vessels or ma[d]e the marina inaccessible to such vessels” and therefore “[c]ertainly” had a “potentially disruptive impact on maritime commerce,” id., at 362. We noted that this first prong went to potential effeсts, not to the “particular facts of the incident,” noting that in both Executive Jet and Foremost we had focused not on the specific facts at hand but on whether the “general features” of the incident were “likely to disrupt commercial activity.”
The first Sisson test turns, then, on a description of the incident at an intermediate level of possible generality. To speak of the incident as “fire” would have been too general to differentiate cases; at the other extreme, to have described the fire as damaging nothing but pleasure boats and their tie-up facilities would have ignored, among other things, the capacity of pleasure boats to endanger commer
Following Sisson, the “general features” of the incident at issue here may be describеd as damage by a vessel in navigable water to an underwater structure. So characterized, there is little question that this is the kind of incident that has a “potentially disruptive impact on maritime commerce.” As it actually turned out in this suit, damaging a structure beneath the riverbed could lead to a disruption in the water course itself, App. 33 (eddy formed above the leak); and, again as it actually happened, damaging a structure so situated could lead to restrictions on the navigational use of the waterway during required repairs. See Pet. for Cert. in No. 93-1094, p. 22a (District Court found that after the flood “[t]he river remained closed for over a month,” “[r]iver traffic ceased, several commuter ferries were stranded, and many barges could not enter the river system ... because the river level was lowered to aid repair efforts”). Cf. Pennzoil Producing Co. v. Offshore Express, Inc.,
In the second Sisson enquiry, we look to whether the general character of the activity giving rise to the incident shows a substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity. We ask whether a tortfeasor’s activity, commercial or noncommercial, on navigable waters is so closely related to activity traditionally subject to admiralty law that the reasons for applying special admiralty rules would apply in
On like reasoning, the “activity giving rise to the incident” in this suit, Sisson, supra, at 364, should be characterized as repair or maintenance work on a navigable waterway performed from a vessel. Described in this way, there is no question that the activity is substantially related to traditional maritime activity, for barges and similar vessels have trаditionally been engaged in repair work similar to what Great Lakes contracted to perform here. See, e. g., Shea v. Rev-Lyn Contracting Co.,
The city argues, to the contrary, that a proper application of the activity prong of Sisson would consider the city’s own alleged failure at properly maintaining and operating the tunnel system that runs under the river. City Brief 48-49. If this asserted proximate cause of the flood victims’ injuries
The city misreads Sisson, however, which did not consider the activities of the washer/dryer manufacturer, who was possibly an additional tortfeasor, and whose activities were hardly maritime; the activities of Sisson, the boat owner, supplied the necessary substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity. Likewise, in Foremost, we said that “[b]ecause the ‘wrong’ here involves the negligent operation of a vessel on navigable waters, we believe that it has a sufficient nexus to traditional maritime activity to sustain admiralty jurisdiction . . . .”
Petitioners also argue that we might get a different result simply by characterizing the “activity” in question at a different level of generality, perhaps as “repair and maintenance,” or as “pile driving near a bridge.” The city is, of course, correct that a tortfeasor’s activity can be described
Grubart makes an additional claim that Sisson is being given too expansive a reading. If the activity at issue here is considered maritime related, it argues, then virtually “every activity involving a vessel on navigable waters” would be “a traditional maritime activity sufficient to invoke maritime jurisdiction.” Grubart Brief 6. But this is not fatal criticism. This Court has not proposed any radical alteration of the traditional criteria for invoking admiralty jurisdiction in tort cases, but has simply followed the lead of the lower federal courts in rejecting a location rule so rigid as to extend admiralty to a case involving an airplane, not a vessel, engaged in an activity far removed from anything traditionally maritime. See Executive Jet,
Ill
Perhaps recognizing the difficulty of escaping the case law, petitioners ask us to change it. In cases “involving land based parties and injuries,” the city would have us adopt a condition of jurisdiction that
“the totality of the circumstances reflects a federal interest in protecting maritime commerce sufficiently weighty to justify shifting what would otherwise be state-court litigation into federal court under the federal law of admiralty.” City Brief 32.
Although the arguments are not frivolous, they do not persuade. It is worth recalling that the Sisson tests are aimed at the same objectives invoked to support a new multifactor test, the elimination of admiralty jurisdiction where the ra
Of course, one could claim it to be odd that under Sisson a land-based party (or more than one) may be subject to admiralty jurisdiction, but it would appear no less odd under the city’s test that a maritime tortfeasor in the most traditional mould might be subject to state common-law jurisdiction. Other things being equal, it is not evident why the first supposed anomaly is worse than the second. But other things are not even equal. As noted just above, Congress has already made the judgment, in the Extension Act, that a land-based victim may properly be subject to admiralty jurisdiction. Surely a land-based joint tortfeasor has no claim to supposedly more favorable treatment.
Nor are these the only objections to the city’s position. Contrаry to what the city suggests, City Brief 10,14-15,25-26, 30, exercise of federal admiralty jurisdiction does not result in automatic displacement of state law. It is true that, “[w]ith admiralty jurisdiction comes the application of substantive admiralty law.” East River S. S. Corp. v. Trans-america Delaval Inc.,
“a destructive oversimplification of the highly intricate interplay of the States and the National Government in*546 their regulation of maritime commerce. It is true that state law must yield to the needs of a uniform federal maritime law when this Court finds inroads on a harmonious system. But this limitation still leaves the States a wide scope.” Romero v. International Terminal Operating Co.,358 U. S. 354 , 373 (1959) (footnote omitted).
See East River, supra, at 864-865 (“Drawn from state and federal sources, the general maritime law is an amalgam of traditional common-law rules, modifications of those rules, and newly created rules” (footnote omitted)). Thus, the city’s proposal to synchronize the jurisdictional enquiry with the test for determining the applicable substantive law would discard a fundamental feature of admiralty law, that federal admiralty courts sometimes do apply state law. See, e. g., American Dredging Co. v. Miller,
Consider, for example, just one of the factors under the city’s test, requiring a district court at the beginning of every purported admiralty case to determine the source (state or federal) of the applicable substantive law. The difficulty of doing that was an important reason why this Court in Romero, supra, was unable to hold that maritime claims fell within the scope of the federal-question-jurisdiction statute, 28 U. S. C. § 1331.
Reasons of practice, then, are as weighty as reasons of theory for rejecting the city’s call to adopt a multifactor test for admiralty jurisdiction for the benefit of land-based parties to a tort action.
Accordingly, we conclude that the Court of Appeals correctly held that the District Court had admiralty jurisdiction over the respondent Great Lakes’s Limitation Act suit. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is
Affirmed.
Notes
Grubart argues, based on Margin v. Sea-Land Services, Inc.,
At oral argument, counsel for the city undercut this argument by conceding that admiralty jurisdiction would govern claims arising from an incident in which a ship on navigable waters slipped its moorings, drifted into a dam, and caused a breach in the dam that resulted in flooding of surrounding territory. Tr. of Oral Arg. 17.
The city in part bases its assertion about the practical effects of a proximate cause rule on a reading of Crowell v. Benson,
Even if the city’s interpretation of Crowell is correct, it is not dispositive here. Constitutional difficulties need not arise when a court defers final determination of facts upon which jurisdiction depends until after the first jurisdictional skirmish. In the standing context, for example, we have held that “the Constitution does not require that the plaintiff offer . . . proof [of the facts showing that the plaintiff sustained actual injury] as a threshold matter in order to invoke the District Court’s jurisdiction.” Gwaltney of Smithfield, Ltd. v. Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Inc.,
The city also proposes that we define the activity as “the operation of an underground tunnel connected to Loop buildings.” City Brief 49-50. But doing this would eliminate the maritime tortfeasor’s activity from consideration entirely. This (like the choice of a supreme level of generality, described in the text) would turn Sisson v. Ruby,
Because we conclude that the tort alleged in Count I of Great Lakes’s complaint satisfies both the location and connection tests necessary for admiralty jurisdiction under 28 U. S. C. § 1333(1), we need not consider respondent Great Lakes’s alternative argument that the Extension of Admiralty Jurisdiction Act, 46 U. S. C. App. § 740, provides an independent basis of federal jurisdiction over the complaint.
We will content ourselves simply with raising a question about another of the city’s assumptions, which does not go to anything dispositive for us. It is true that this Court has said that “the primary focus of admiralty jurisdiction is unquestionably the protection of maritime commerce,” Foremost Ins. Co. v. Richardson,
Concurrence Opinion
concurring.
I concur in the Court’s judgment and opinion. The Court properly holds that, when a court is faced with a case involving multiple tortfeasors, some of whom may not be maritime actors, if one of the putative tortfeasors was engaged in traditional maritime activity alleged to have proximately caused the incident, then the supposedly wrongful activity “involves” traditional maritime activity. The possible involvement of other, nonmaritime parties does not affect the jurisdictional inquiry as to the maritime party. Ante, at 541. I do not, however, understand the Court’s opinion to suggest that, having found admiralty jurisdiction over a particular claim against a particular party, a court must then exercise admiralty jurisdiction over all the claims and parties involved in the case. Rather, the court should engage in the usual supplemental jurisdiction and impleader inquiries. See 28 U. S. C. § 1367 (1988 ed., Supp. V); Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 14; see also ante, at 531. I find nothing in the Court’s opinion to the contrary.
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the majority’s conclusion that 28 U. S. C. §1333(1) grants the District Court jurisdiction over the great Chicago flood of 1992. But I write separately because I cannot agree with the test the Court applies to determine the boundaries of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. Instead of continuing our unquestioning allegiance to the multifactor apprоach of Sisson v. Ruby,
I
This action requires the Court to redefine once again the line between federal admiralty jurisdiction and state power due to an ambiguous balancing test. The fact that we have had to revisit this question for the third time in a little over 10 years indicates the defects of the Court’s current approach. The faults of balancing tests are clearest, and perhaps most destructive, in the area of jurisdiction. Vague and obscure rules may permit judicial power to reach beyond its constitutional and statutory limits, or they may discourage judges from hearing disputes properly before them. Such rules wastе judges’ and litigants’ resources better spent on the merits, as this action itself demonstrates. It is especially unfortunate that this has occurred in admiralty, an area that once provided a jurisdictional rule almost as clear as the 9th and 10th verses of Genesis: “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God
As recently as 1972, courts and parties experienced little difficulty in determining whether a case triggered admiralty jurisdiction, thanks to the simple “situs rule.” In The Plymouth,
The simplicity of this test was marred by modern cases that tested the boundaries of admiralty jurisdiction with ever more unusual facts. In Executive Jet Aviation, Inc. v. Cleveland,
“One area in which locality as the exclusive test of admiralty tort jurisdiction has given rise to serious problems in application is that of aviation.... [W]e have concluded that maritime locality alone is not a sufficient predicate for admiralty jurisdiction in aviation tort cases.” Id., at 261 (emphasis added).
Our identification of the “significant relationship” factor occurred wholly in the context of a discussion of the difficulties
Although it modified the strict locality test, Executive Jet still retained a clear rule that I could apply comfortably to the main business of the admiralty court. Nonetheless, the simplicity and clarity of this approach met its demise in Foremost Ins. Co. v. Richardson,
It is clear that Foremost overextended Executive Jet, which had reserved the significant relationship inquiry for aviation torts. As Justice Scalia noted in Sisson, Executive Jet is better “understood as resting on the quite simple ground that the tort did not involve a vessel, which had traditionally been thought required by the leading scholars in the field.”
Sisson then affirmed the inherent vagueness of the Foremost test. Sisson involved a marina fire that was caused by a faulty washer/dryer unit on a pleasure yacht. The fire destroyed the yacht and damaged several vessels in addition to the marina. In finding admiralty jurisdiction, the Court held that the federal judicial power would extend to such cases only if: (1) in addition to situs, (2) the “incident” poses a potential hazard to maritime commerce, and (3) the “activity” giving rise to the incident bears a substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity.
. The disruption and confusion created by the Foremost-Sisson approach is evident from the post-Sisson decisions of the lower courts and from the majority opinion itself. Faced with the task of determining what is an “incident” or “activity” for Sisson purposes, the Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits simply reverted to the multifactor test they had employed before Sisson. See Price v. Price,
Although the majority makes an admirable attempt to clarify what Sisson obscures, I am afrаid that its analysis cannot mitigate the confusion of the Sisson test. Thus, faced with the “potential to disrupt maritime commerce” prong, ante, at 538, the majority must resort to “an intermediate level of possible generality” to determine the “ ‘general features’ ” of the incident here, ibid. The majority does not explain the origins of “levels of generality,” nor, to my knowledge, do we employ such a concept in other areas of jurisdiction. We do not use “levels of generality” to characterize residency or amount in controversy for diversity purposes, or to determine the presence of a federal question. Nor does the majority explain why an “intermediate” level of generality is appropriate. It is even unclear what an intermediate level of generality is, and we cannot expect that district courts will apply such a concept uniformly in similar cases. It is far from obvious how the undefined intermediate level of generality indicates that the “incident” for Sis-son purposes is that of a vessel damaging an underwater structure.
The majority also applies levels of generality to the next prong of Sisson — whether the tortfeasor is engaged in “activity” that shows a “substantial relationship to traditional
II
It should be apparent that this Court does not owe Sisson the benefit of stare decisis. As shown above, Sisson and Foremost themselves overextended Executive Jet and deviated from a long tradition of admiralty jurisprudence. More importantly, the new test of Sisson and Foremost did not produce greater clarity or simplicity in exchange for departing from a century of undisturbed practice. Instead, as discussed earlier, the two cases have produced only confusion and disarray in the lower courts and in this Court as well. It would seem that in the area of federal subject-matter jurisdiction, vagueness and ambiguity are grounds enough to revisit an unworkable prior decision.
In this action, a straightforward application of the proposed test easily produces a finding of admiralty jurisdiction. As the majority quite ably demonstrates, the situs requirement is satisfied because the tort was caused by a “spud barge” on the Chicago River. Ante, at 534-536. Although the accident’s effects were felt on land, the Extension of Admiralty Jurisdiction Act brings the event within §1333(1). While I agree with the majority’s analysis of this question, I disagree with its decision to continue on to other issues. A simple application of the situs test would yield the same result the Court reaches at the end of its analysis.
This Court pursues clarity and efficiency in other areas of federal subject-matter jurisdiction, and it should demand no less in admiralty and maritime law. The test I have pro