JEROME B. GRUBART, INC. v. GREAT LAKES DREDGE & DOCK CO. ET AL.
No. 93-762
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Argued October 12, 1994—Decided February 22, 1995
513 U.S. 527
*Together with No. 93-1094, City of Chicago v. Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. et al., also on certiorari to the same court.
Ben Barnow argued the cause for petitioner in No. 93-762. With him on the briefs were Alan M. Goldberg, Albert Cueller, Robert A. Holstein, Aron D. Robinson, William J. Harte, Philip B. Kurland, and Alan S. Madans. Lawrence Rosenthal argued the cause for petitioner in No. 93-1094. With him on the briefs were Susan S. Sher, Benna Ruth Solomon, Stuart D. Fullerton, Theodore R. Tetzlaff, Barry Sullivan, Russ M. Strobel, and Michael F. Sturley.
John G. Roberts, Jr., argued the cause for respondent Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. in both cases. With him on the brief were David G. Leitch, Douglas M. Reimer, Carl W. Schwarz, Stewart W. Karge, William P. Schuman, Jeffrey E. Stone, Duane M. Kelley, and Jack J. Crowe.†
JUSTICE SOUTER 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 Loоp. 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, 10 Wall. 557, 563 (1871). See Escanaba Co. v. Chicago, 107 U. S. 678, 683 (1883). The pilings (called dolphins) keep ships from bumping into the piers and so protect both. After winning the contract, Great Lakes carried out the work with two barges towed by a tug. One barge carried pilings; the other carried a crane thаt pulled out old pilings and helped drive in new ones.
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 actions 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 tunnеl 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
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.
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 3 F. 3d, at 231, n. 9; see also
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.”
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
“[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., 373 U. S. 206, 209-210 (1963); Executive Jet Aviation, Inc. v. Cleveland, 409 U. S. 249, 260 (1972).
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 оf an airplane that collided with a flock of birds just after takeoff on a do-
The second decision, Foremost Ins. Co. v. Richardson, 457 U. S. 668 (1982), dealt with tort claims arising out of the collision of two pleasure boats in a navigable river estuary. We held that admiralty courts had jurisdiction, id., at 677, even though jurisdiction existed only if “the wrong” had “a significant connection with traditional maritime activity,” id., at 674. We conceded that pleasure boats themselves had little to do with the maritime commerce lying at the heart of the admiralty court‘s basic work, id., at 674-675, but we nonetheless found the necessary relationship in
“[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, 497 U. S. 358 (1990), we held that a federal admiralty court had jurisdiction over tort claims arising when a fire, caused by a defective washer/dryer aboard a pleasure boat docked at a marina, burned the boat, other boats docked nearby, and the marina itself. Id., at 367. We elaborated on the enquiry exemplified in Executive Jet and Foremost by focusing on two points to determine the relationship of a claim to the objectives of admiralty jurisdiction. We noted, first, that
After Sisson, then, a party seeking to invoke federal admiralty jurisdiction pursuant to
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., 107 U. S., at 683. Thus, if Great Lakes committed a tort, it must have done it while on navigable waters.
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.”
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 familiar 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, 520 F. 2d 974, 979 (CA4 1975), cert. denied, 423 U. S. 1055 (1976); Adams v. Harris County, 452 F. 2d 994, 996-997 (CA5 1971), cert. denied, 406 U. S. 968 (1972). This classic tort notion normally eliminates the bizarre, cf. Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N. Y. 339, 162 N. E. 99 (1928), and its use should obviate not only the complication but even the need for further temporal or spatial limitations. Nor is reliance on familiar proximate causation inconsistent with Gutierrez, which used its nonremote language, not to announce a special test, but simply to distinguish its own facts (the victim having slipped оn beans spilling from cargo containers being unloaded from a ship) from what the Court called “[v]arious far-fetched hypotheticals,” such as injury to someone slipping on beans that continue to leak from the
The city responds by saying that, as a practical 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.3 The argument, of course, assumes that the truth of jurisdictional allegations must always be determined with finality at the threshold of litigation, but that assumption is erroneous. Normal practice permits a party to establish jurisdiction at the outset of a case by means of a nonfrivolous assertion of jurisdictional elements, see, e. g., Bray v. Alexandria Women‘s Health Clinic, 506 U. S. 263, 285 (1993); Bell v. Hood, 327 U. S. 678, 682-683 (1946), and any litigation of a contested subject-matter jurisdictional fact issue occurs in comparatively summary proce-
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 satisf[ied]” the first maritime connеction 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 effects, 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.” 497 U. S., at 363.
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 described 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 watercourse 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 ceаsed, 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., 943 F. 2d 1465 (CA5 1991) (admiralty suit when vessel struck and ruptured gas pipeline and gas exploded); Marathon Pipe Line Co. v. Drilling Rig Rowan/Odessa, 761 F. 2d 229, 233 (CA5 1985) (admiralty jurisdiction when vessel struck pipeline, “a fixed structure on the seabed“); Orange Beach Water, Sewer, and Fire Protection Authority v. M/V Alva, 680 F. 2d 1374 (CA11 1982) (admiralty suit when vessel struck underwater pipeline).
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 “aсtivity 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 traditionally been engaged in repair work similar to what Great Lakes contracted to perform here. See, e. g., Shea v. Rev-Lyn Contracting Co., 868 F. 2d 515, 518 (CA1 1989) (bridge repair by crane-carrying barge); Nelson v. United States, 639 F. 2d 469, 472 (CA9 1980) (Kennedy, J.) (repair of wave suppressor from a barge); In re New York Dock Co., 61 F. 2d 777 (CA2 1932) (pile driving from crane-carrying barge in connection with the building of a dock); In re P. Sanford Ross, Inc., 196 F. 921, 923-924 (EDNY 1912) (pile driving from crane-carrying barge close to water‘s edge), rev‘d on other grounds, 204 F. 248 (CA2 1913); cf. In re The V-14813, 65 F. 2d 789, 790 (CA5 1933) (“There are many cases holding that a dredge, or a barge with a pile driver, employed on navigable waters, is subject to maritime jurisdiction . . . § 7.54“); Lawrence v. Flatboat, 84 F. 200 (SD Ala. 1897) (pile driving from crane-carrying barge in connection with the erection of bulkheads), aff‘d sub nom. Southern Log Cart & Supply Co. v. Lawrence, 86 F. 907 (CA5 1898).
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 mаintaining 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 . . . .” 457 U. S., at 674. By using the word “involves,” we made it clear that we need to look only to whether one of the arguably proximate causes of the incident originated in the maritime activity of a tortfeasor: as long as one of the putative tortfeasors was еngaged in traditional maritime activity the allegedly wrongful activity will “involve” such traditional maritime activity and will meet the second nexus prong. Thus, even if we were to identify the “activity giving rise to the incident” as including the acts of the city as well as Great Lakes, admiralty jurisdiction would nevertheless attach. That result would be true to Sisson‘s requirement of a “substantial relationship” between the “activity giving rise to the incident” and traditional maritime activity. Sisson did not require, as the city in effect asserts, that there be a complete identity between the two. The substantial relationship test is satisfied when at least one alleged tortfeasor was engaging in activity substantially related to traditional maritime activity and such activity is claimed to have been a proximate cause of the incident.
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 nеar 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, 409 U. S., at 268-274; see also Peytavin v. Government Employees Ins. Co., 453 F. 2d 1121, 1127 (CA5 1972) (no jurisdiction over claim
III
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 сlaim to supposedly more favorable treatment.
Nor are these the only objections to the city‘s position. Contrary 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. Transamerica Delaval Inc., 476 U. S. 858, 864 (1986). But, to characterize that law, as the city apparently does, as “federal rules of decision,” City Brief 15, is
“a destructive oversimplification of the highly intricate interplay of the States and the National Government in
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, 510 U. S. 443, 451-452 (1994); see also 1 S. Friedell, Benedict on Admiralty § 112, p. 7-49 (7th ed. 1994).6
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,
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.
JUSTICE STEVENS and JUSTICE BREYER took no part in the decision of these cases.
JUSTICE O‘CONNOR, 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
I agree with the majority‘s conclusion that
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 waste 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 thаt 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, 3 Wall. 20, 36 (1866), this Court articulated the situs rule thus: “Every species of tort, however occurring, and whether on board a vessel or not, if upon the high seas or navigable waters, is of admiralty cognizance.” This simple, clear test, which Justice Story pronounced while riding circuit, see Thomas v. Lane, 23 F. Cas. 957, 960 (No. 13,902) (CC Me. 1813), did not require alteration until 1948, when Congress included within the admiralty jurisdiction torts caused on water, but whose effects were felt on land. See
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, 409 U. S. 249 (1972), we held that a plane crash in Lake Erie was not an admiralty case within the meaning of
“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, 457 U. S. 668 (1982). That case involved the collision of two pleasure boats on the navigable waters, a tort that some commentators had argued did not fall within the admiralty jurisdiction because it did not implicate maritime commerce. See, e. g., Stolz, Pleasure Boating and Admiralty: Erie at Sea, 51 Calif. L. Rev. 661 (1963). The Court could have resolved the case and found jurisdiction simply by applying the situs test. Instead, responding to the arguments that admiralty jurisdiction was limited to commercial maritime activity, the Court found that the tort‘s “significant connection with traditional maritime activity” and the accident‘s “potential disruptive impact” on maritime commerce prompted an exercise of federal jurisdiction. 457 U. S., at 674-675.
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.” 497 U. S., at 369-370 (opinion concurring in judgment). Executive Jet did not in the least seek to alter the strict locality test for torts involving waterborne vessels. Foremost, however, converted Executive Jet‘s exception into
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 suсh 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. 497 U. S., at 362-364. The traditional situs test also would have sustained a finding of jurisdiction because the fire started on board a vessel on the waterways. Thus, what was once a simple question—did the tort occur on the navigable waters—had become a complicated, multifactor analysis.
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, 929 F. 2d 131, 135-136 (CA4 1991); Coats v. Penrod Drilling Corp., 5 F. 3d 877, 885-886 (CA5 1993); Delta Country Ventures, Inc. v. Magana, 986 F. 2d 1260, 1263 (CA9 1993). The District Court‘s opinion in this action is typical: While nodding to Sisson, the court focused its entire attention on a totality-of-the-circumstances test, which includes factors such as “the
Although the majority makes an admirable attempt to clarify what Sisson obscures, I am afraid 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 “genеral 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 Sisson 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 relatiоnship 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 causеd by a “spud barge” on the Chicago River. Ante, at 534-536. Although the accident‘s effects were felt on land, the
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-