delivered the opinion of the Court.
We brought this case here to consider whether
The Harrisburg,
The complaint sets forth that Edward Moragne, a longshoreman, was killed while working aboard the vessel Palmetto State in navigable waters within the State of Florida. Petitioner, as his widow and representative of his estate, brought this suit in a state court against respondent States Marine Lines, Inc., the owner of the vessel, to recover damages for wrongful death and for the pain and suffering experienced by the decedent prior to his death. The claims were predicated upon both negligence and the unseaworthiness of the vessel.
States Marine removed the case to the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Florida on the basis of diversity of citizenship, see 28 U. S. C. §§ 1332, 1441, and there filed a third-party complaint against respondent Gulf Florida Terminal Company, the decedent’s employer, asserting that Gulf had contracted to perform stevedoring services on the vessel in a workmanlike manner and that any negligence or unseaworthiness causing the accident resulted from Gulf’s operations.
Both States Marine and Gulf sought dismissal of the portion of petitioner’s complaint that requested damages for wrongful death on the basis of unseaworthiness. They contended that maritime law provided no recovery for wrongful death within a State’s territorial waters, and that the statutory right of action for death under Florida law, Fla. Stat. § 768.01 (1965), did not encompass unseaworthiness as a basis of liability. The District Court dismissed the challenged portion of the complaint on this ground, citing this Court’s decision in
The Tungus
v.
Skovgaard,
In
The Tungus
this Court divided on the consequences that should flow from the rule of maritime law that “in the absence of a statute there is no action for wrongful death,” first announced in
The Harrisburg.
All members of the Court agreed that where a death on state territorial waters is left remediless by the general maritime law and by federal statutes, a remedy may be provided under any applicable state law giving a right of action for death by wrongful act. However, four Justices dissented from the Court’s further holding that “when admiralty adopts a State’s right of action for wrongful death, it must enforce the right as an integrated whole, with whatever conditions and limitations the creating State has attached.”
The extent of the role to be played by state law under
The Tungus
has been the subject of substantial debate and uncertainty in this Court, see
Hess
v.
United States,
The Court's opinion in
The Harrisburg
acknowledged that the result reached had little justification except in primitive English legal history — a history far removed from the American law of remedies for maritime deaths.
One would expect, upon an inquiry into the sources of the common-law rule, to find a clear and compelling justification for what seems a striking departure from the result dictated by elementary principles in the law of remedies. Where existing law imposes a primary duty, violations of which are compensable if they cause injury, nothing in ordinary notions of justice suggests that a violation should be nonactionable simply because it was serious enough to cause death. On the contrary, that rule has been criticized ever since its inception, and described in such terms as “barbarous.”
E. g., Osborn
v.
Gillett,
L. R. 8 Ex. 88, 94 (1873) (Lord Bramwell, dissenting) ; F. Pollock, Law of Torts 55 (Landon ed. 1951); 3 W. Holdsworth, History of English Law 676-677 (3d ed. 1927). Because the primary duty already exists,
Legal historians have concluded that the sole substantial basis for the rule at common law is a feature of the early English law that did not survive into this century— the felony-merger doctrine. Sеe Pollock,
supra,
at 52-57; Holdsworth, The Origin of the Rule in
Baker
v.
Bolton,
32 L. Q. Rev. 431 (1916). According to this doctrine, the common law did not allow civil recovery for an act that constituted both a tort and a felony. The tort was treated as less important than the offense against the Crown, and was merged into, or pre-empted by, the felony.
Smith
v.
Sykes,
The first explicit statement of the common-law rule against recovery for wrongful death came in the opinion
The historical justification marshaled for the rule in England never existed in this country. In limited instances American law did adopt a vestige of the felony-merger doctrine, to the effect that a civil action was delayed until after the criminal trial. However, in this country the felony punishment did not include forfeiture of property; therefore, there was nothing, even in those limited instances, to bar a subsequent civil suit.
E. g., Grosso
v.
Delaware, Lackawanna & West. R. Co.,
50 N. J. L. 317, 319-320,
Some courts explained that their holdings were prompted by an asserted difficulty in computation of damages for wrongful death or by a “repugnance . . . to setting a price upon human life.”
E. g., Connecticut Mut. Life Ins. Co.
v.
New York & N. H. R. Co.,
It was suggested by some courts and commentators that the prohibition of nonstatutory wrongful-death actions derived support from the ancient common-law rule that a personal cause of action in tort did not survive the death of its possessor,
e. g., Eden
v.
Lexington & Frankfort R. Co.,
The most likely reason that the English rule was adopted in this country without much question is simply that it had the blessing of age. That was the thrust of this Court’s opinion in
Brame,
as well as many of the lower court opinions.
E. g., Grosso
v.
Delaware, Lackawanna & West. R. Co., supra.
Such nearly automatic adoption seems at odds with the general principle, widely accepted during the early years of our Nation, that while “[o]ur ancestors brought with them [the] general principles [of the common law] and claimed it as their birthright; . . . they brought with them and adopted only that portion which was applicable to their situation.”
Van Ness
v.
Pacard, 2
Pet. 137, 144 (1829) (Story,
J.); The Lottawanna,
Further, even after the decision in
Brame,
it is not apparent why the Court in
The Harrisburg
concluded that there should not be a different rule for admiralty from that applied at common law. Maritime law had always, in this country as in England, been a thing apart from the common law. It was, to a large extent, administered by different courts; it owed a much greater debt to the civil law;
5
and, from its focus on a par
“There are cases, indeed, in which it has been held that in a suit at law, no redress can be had by the surviving representative for injuries occasioned by the death of one through the wrong of another; but these are all common-law cases, and the common law has its peculiar rules in relation to this subject, traceable to the feudal system and its forfeitures . . . and certainly it better becomes the humane and liberal character of proceedings in admiralty to give than to withhold the remedy, when not required to withhold it by established and inflexible rules.” Id., at 910.
Numerous other federal maritime cases, on similar reasoning, had reached the same result.
E. g., The Columbia,
II
We need not, however, pronounce a verdict on whether The Harrisburg, when decided, was a correct extrapolation of the principles of decisional law then in existence. A development of major significance has intervened, making clear that the rule against recovery for wrongful death is sharply out of keeping with the policies of modern American maritime law. This development is the wholesale abandonment of the rule in most of the areas where it once held sway, quite evidently prompted by the same sense of the rule’s injustice that generated so much criticism of its original promulgation.
To some extent this rejection has been judicial. The English House of Lords in 1937 emasculated the rule without expressly overruling it.
Rose
v.
Ford,
[1937] A. C. 826. Lord Atkin remarked about the decision in
S. S. Amerika
that “[t]he reasons given, whether his
Much earlier, however, the legislatures both here and in England began to evidence unanimous disapproval of the rule against recovery for wrongful death. The first statute partially abrogating the rule was Lord Campbell’s Act, 9 & 10 Viet., c. 93 (1846), which granted recovery to the families of persons killed by tortious conduct, “although the Death shall have been caused under such Circumstances as amount in Law to Felony.” 7
These numerous and broadly applicable statutes, taken as a whole, make it clear that there is no present public policy against allowing recovery for wrongful death. The statutes evidence a wide rejection by the legislatures of whatever justifications may once have existed for a general refusal to allow such recovery. This legislative establishment of policy carries significance beyond the particular scope of each of the statutes involved. The policy thus established has become itself a part of our
“[I]t seems to me that courts in dealing with statutes sometimes have been too slow to recognize that statutes even when in terms covering only particular cases may imply a policy different from that of the common law, and therefore may exclude a reference to the common law for the purpose of limiting their scope. Johnson v. United States,163 Fed. 30 , 32. Without going into the reasons for the notion that an action (other than an appeal) does not lie for causing the death of a human being, it is enough to say that they have disappeared. The policy that forbade such an action, if it was more profound than the absence of a remedy when a man’s body was hanged and his goods confiscated for the felony, has been shown not to be the policy of present law by statutes of the United States and of most if not all of the States.” Panama R. Co. v. Rock,266 U. S. 209 , 216 (1924) (dissenting opinion). 9
Dean Pound subsequently echoed this observation, concluding that: “Today we should be thinking of the death
This appreciation of the broader role played by legislation in the development of the law reflects the practices of common-law court's from the most ancient times. As Professor Landis has said, “much of what is ordinarily regarded as 'common law’ finds its source in legislative enactment.” Landis, supra, at 214. It has always been the duty of the common-law court to perceive the impact of major legislative innovations and to interweave the new legislative policies with the inherited body of common-law principles — many of them deriving from earlier legislative exertions.
The legislature does not, of course, merely enact general policies. By the terms of a statute, it also indicates its conception of the sphere within which the policy is to have effect. In many cases the scope of a statute may reflect nothing more than the dimensions of the particular problem that came to the attention of the legislature, inviting the conclusion that the legislative policy is equally applicable to other situations in which the mischief is identical. This conclusion is reinforced where there exists not one enactment but a course of legislation dealing with a series of situations, and where the generality of the underlying princiрle is attested by the legislation of other jurisdictions.
Id.,
at 215-216, 220-222. On the other hand, the legislature may, in order to promote other, conflicting interests, prescribe with particularity the compass of the legislative aim, erecting a strong inference that territories beyond the boundaries so drawn are not to feel the impact of the new legislative dispensation. We must, therefore, analyze with care the congressional enactments that have abrogated the common-law rule in the maritime field, to
Ill
Our undertaking, therefore, is to determine whether Congress has given such a direction in its legislation granting remedies for wrongful deaths in portions of the maritime domain. We find that Congress has given no affirmative indication of an intent to preclude the judicial allowance of a remedy for wrongful death to persons in the situation of this petitioner.
From the date of
The Harrisburg
until 1920, there was no remedy for death on the high seas caused by breach of one of the duties imposed by federal maritime law. For deaths within state territorial waters, the federal law accommodated the humane policies of state wrongful-death statutes by allowing recovery whenever an applicable state statute favored such recovery.
10
Congress acted in 1920 to furnish the remedy denied by the courts for deaths beyond the jurisdiction of any State, by pass
“Whenever the death of a person shall be caused by wrongful act, neglect, or default occurring on the high seas beyond a marine league from the shore of any State, . . . the personal representative of the decedent may maintain a suit for damages in the district courts of the United States, in admiralty, for the exclusive benefit of the decedent’s wife, husband, parent, child, or dependent relative against the vessel, person, or corporation which would have been liable if death had not ensued.”
Section 7 of the Act further provides:
“The provisions of any State statute giving or regulating rights of action or remedies for death shall not be affected by this [Act]. Nor shall this [Act] apply to the Great Lakes or to any waters within the territorial limits of any State . . . .”
The second statute was the Jones Act, 41 Stat. 1007, 46 U. S. C. § 688, which, by extending to seamen the protections of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, provided a right of recovery against their employers for negligence resulting in injury or death. This right follows from the seaman’s employment status and is not limited to injury or death occurring on the high seas. 11
The second incongruity is that identical breaches of the duty to provide a seaworthy ship, resulting in death, produce liability outside the three-mile limit — since a claim under the Death on the High Seas Act may be founded on unseaworthiness, see
Kernan
v.
American Dredging Co.,
The third, and assertedly the “strangest” anomaly is that a true seaman — that is, a member of a ship’s company, covered by the Jones Act — is provided no remedy for death caused by unseaworthiness within territorial waters, while a longshoreman, to whom the duty of seaworthiness was extended only because he performs work
There is much force to the United States’ argument that these distinctions are so lacking in any apparent justification that we should not, in the absence of compelling evidence, presume that Congress affirmatively intended to freeze them into maritime law. There should be no presumption that Congress has removed this Court’s traditional responsibility to vindicate the policies of maritime law by ceding that function exclusively to the
The legislative history of the Act suggests that respondents misconceive the thrust of the congressional concern. Both the Senate and House Reports consist primarily of quoted remarks by supporters of the proposed Act. Those supporters stated that the rule of
The Harrisburg,
which had been rejected by “[ejvery country of western Europe,” was “a disgrace to a civilized people.” “There is no reason why the admiralty law of the United States should longer depend on the statute laws of the States. . . . Congress can now bring our maritime law into line with the laws of those enlightened nations which confer a right of action for death at sea.” The Act would accomplish that result “for deaths on the high seas, leaving unimpaired the rights under State statutes as to deaths on waters within the territorial jurisdiсtion of the States. . . . This is for the purpose of uniformity, as the States can not properly legislate for the high seas.” S. Rep. No. 216, 66th Cong., 1st Sess., 3, 4 (1919); H. R. Rep. No. 674, 66th Cong., 2d Sess., 3, 4 (1920). The discussion of the bill on the floor of the House evidenced the same concern that a cause of action be provided “in cases where there is now no remedy,” 59 Cong. Rec. 4486, and at the same time that “the power of the States to create actions for wrongful death in no way be affected by enactment of the federal law.”
The Tungus
v.
Skovgaard,
Read in light of the state of maritime law in 1920, we believe this legislative history indicates that Congress intended to ensure the continued availability of a remedy, historically provided by the States, for deaths in territorial waters; its failure to extend the Act to cover such deaths primarily reflected the lack of necessity for coverage by a federal statute, rather than an affirmative
The beneficiaries of persons meeting death on territorial waters did not suffer at that time from being excluded from the coverage of the Act. To the contrary, the state remedies that were left undisturbed not only were familiar but also may actually have been more generous than the remedy provided by the new Act. On the one hand, the primary basis of recovery under state wrongful-death statutes was negligence. On the other hand, the substantive duties imposed at that time by general maritime law were vastly different from those that presently exist. “[T]he seaman’s right to recover damages for injuries caused by unseaworthiness of the ship was an obscure and relatively little used remedy,” perhaps largely because prior to this Court’s decision in
Mahnich
v.
Southern S. S. Co.,
Since that time the equation has changed drastically, through this Court’s transformation of the shipowner’s duty to provide a seaworthy ship into an absolute duty not satisfied by due diligence. See,
e. g., Mahnich
v.
Southern S. S. Co., supra; Mitchell
v.
Trawler Racer, Inc.,
To put it another way, the message of the Act is that it does not by its own force abrogate available state remedies; no intention appears that the Act have the effect of foreclosing any nonstatutory federal remedies that might be found appropriate to effectuate the policies of general maritime law. 14
That our conclusion is wholly consistent with the congressional purpose is confirmed by the passage of the
We conclude that the Death on the High Seas Act was not intended to preclude the availability of a remedy for wrongful death under general maritime law in situations not covered by the Act.
16
Because the refusal of mari
IV
Very weighty considerations underlie the principle that courts should not lightly overrule past decisions. Among these are the desirability that the law furnish a clear guide for the conduct of individuals, to enable them to plan their affairs with assurance against untoward surprise; the importance of furthering fair and expeditious adjudication by eliminating the need to relitigate every relevant proposition in every case; and the necessity of maintaining public faith in the judiciary as a source of impersonal and reasoned judgments. The reasons for rejecting any established rule must always be weighed against these factors.
The first factor, often considered the mainstay of
stare decisis,
is singularly absent in this case. The confidence of people in their ability to predict the legal consequences of their actions is vitally necessary to facilitate the planning of primary activity and to encourage the settlement of disputes without resort to the courts. However, that confidence is threatened least by the announcement of a new remedial rule to effectuate well-established primary rules of behavior. There is no
Nor do either of the other relevant strands of
stare decisis
counsel persuasively against the overruling of
The Harrisburg.
Certainly the courts could not provide expeditious resolution of disputes if every rule were fair game for
de novo
reconsideration in every case. However, the situation we face is far removed from any such consequence as that. We do not regard the rule of
The Harrisburg
as a closely arguable proposition — it rested on a most dubious foundation when announced, has become an increasingly unjustifiable anomaly as the law over the years has left it behind, and, in conjunction with its corollary,
The Tungus,
has produced litigation-spawning confusion in an area that should be easily susceptible of more workable solutions. The rule has
y
Respondents argue that overruling
The Harrisburg
will necessitate a long course of decisions to spell out the elements of the new “cause of action.” We believe these fears are exaggerated, because our decision does not require the fashioning of a whole new body of federal law, but merely removes a bar to access to the existing
Respondents argue, for example, that a statute of limitations must be devised or “borrowed” for the new wrongful-death claim. However, petitioner and the United States respond that since we have simply removed the barrier to general maritime actions for fatal injuries, there is no reason — in federal admiralty suits at least
18
— that such actions should not share the doctrine of laches immemorially applied to admiralty claims. In applying that doctrine, the argument runs, the courts should give consideration to the two-year statute of limitations in the Death on the High Seas Act,
19
just as they have always looked for analogy to appropriate state or foreign statutes of limitations. See
Kenney
v.
Trinidad Corp.,
The one aspect of a claim for wrongful death that has no precise counterpart in the established law governing nonfatal injuries is the determination of the beneficiaries who are entitled to recover. General maritime law, which denied any recovery for wrongful death, found no need to specify which dependents should receive such recovery. On this question, petitioner and the United States argue that we may look for guidance to the expressions of Congress, which has spoken on this
The United States contends that, of the three, the provision that should be borrowed for wrongful-death actions under general maritime law is that of the Death on the High Seas Act. It is the congressional enactment that deals specifically and exclusively with actions for wrongful death, and that simply provides a remedy — for deaths on the high seas — for breaches of the duties imposed by general maritime law. In contrast, the beneficiary provisions of the Jones Act are applicable only to a specific class of actions — claims by seamen against their employers — based on violations of the special standard of negligence that has been imposed under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act. That standard appears to be unlike any imposed by general maritime law. Further, although the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act is applicable to longshoremen such as petitioner’s late husband, its principles of recovery are wholly foreign to those of general maritime law — like most workmen’s compensation laws, it deals only with the responsibilities of employers for death or injury to their employees, and provides standardized amounts of compensation regardless of fault on the part of the employer.
The only one of these statutes that applies not just to a class of workers but to any “person,” and that bases liability on conduct violаtive of general maritime
We do not determine this issue now, for we think its final resolution should await further sifting through the lower courts in future litigation. For present purposes we conclude only that its existence affords no sufficient reason for not coming to grips with The Harrisburg. If still other subsidiary issues should require resolution, such as particular questions of the measure of damages, the courts will not be without persuasive analogy for guidance. Both the Death on the High Seas Act and the numerous state wrongful-death acts have been implemented with success for decades. The experience thus built up сounsels that a suit for wrongful death raises no problems unlike those that have long been grist for the judicial mill.
In sum, in contrast to the torrent of difficult litigation that has swirled about The Harrisburg, The Tungus, which followed upon it, and the problems of federal-state accommodation they occasioned, the recognition of a remedy for wrongful death under general maritime law can be expected to bring more placid waters. That prospect indeed makes for, and not against, the discarding of The Harrisburg.
It is so ordered.
Notes
Respondents argue that petitioner is foreclosed from seeking a remedy for wrongful death under general maritime law by her failure to invoke that law at the proper time in the courts below. In the state trial court, which was bound to apply federal maritime law in a case within federal admiralty jurisdiction,
e. g., Hess
v.
United States,
At that point, petitioner moved the Court of Appeals to uphold her claim as a matter of federal law, despite the state court’s ruling. In her brief in support of this motion, petitioner urged that the rule of
The Tungus
was unsound; that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in this case was the first since
The Tungus
in which a state court had read its wrongful-death act to exclude unsea worthiness; and that the lack of uniformity thus produced dictated a re-examina
The Court of Appeals affirmed, stating: “No useful purpose will be served by additional review of pertinent authority upon the issue of law presented in this appeal. It is sufficient to say that in The Tungus v. Skovgaard, . . . the United States Supreme Court held that the question whether a State Wrongful Death Act encompasses a cause of action for unseaworthiness is a question to be decided by the courts of that state.”
While this language is not in itself wholly clear, we think it evident in the circumstances that the Court of Appeals considered and rejected petitioner’s attack on
The Tungus.
After granting petitioner an opportunity to present that attack at length, and without receiving any objections from respondents to its consideration, the Court of Appeals cannot be presumed to have refused to entertain it. Rather, we read the opinion as stating that the court deemed itself bound by
The Tungus
despite petitioner’s challenge to that decision. The Court of Appeals had earlier voiced strong criticism of the prevailing law in this area, but had concluded that it was bound to follow
The Harrisburg
and
The Tungus. Kenney
v.
Trinidad Corp.,
Since the Court of Appeals, without objection, treated the merits of petitioner’s attack on
The Tungus,
we need not consider whether she might otherwise be precluded from pressing that attack here because of her default in failing to urge the same theory in the trial courts. See
Neely
v.
Martin K. Eby Constr. Co.,
Brame
was decided, of course, at a time when the federal courts under
Swift
v.
Tyson,
The Court stated:
“The argument everywhere in support of such suits in admiralty has been, not that the maritime law, as actually administered in common law countries, is different from the common law in this particular, but that the common law is not founded on good reason, and is contrary to ‘natural equity and the general principles of law.’ Since, however, it is now established that in the courts of the United States no aсtion at law can be maintained for such a wrong in the absence of a statute giving the right, and it has not been shown that the maritime law, as accepted and received by maritime nations generally, has established a different rule for the government of the courts of admiralty from those which govern courts of law in matters of this kind, we are forced to the conclusion that no such action will lie in the courts of the United States under the general maritime law.” 119 U. S., at 213 .
The decision in
S. S. Amerika
was placed also on an alternative ground, which is independently sufficient. In that case, which arose from a collision between a Royal Navy submarine and a private vessel, the Crown sought to recover from the owners of the private vessel the pensions payable to the families of navy sailors who died in the collision. The first ground given for rejecting the claim was that the damages sought were too remote to be protected by tort law, because the pensions were voluntary payments and because they were not a measure of “the future services of which the Admiralty had been deprived.”
Id.,
at 42, 50-51. Similar alternative reasoning was given in
Brame,
which involved a similar situation.
The Court in
The Harrisburg
acknowledged that, at least according to the courts of France, the civil law did allow recovery for the injury suffered by dependents of a person killed. It noted, however, that the Louisiana courts took a different view of the civil law, and that English maritime law did not seem to differ in this
Lord Wright, concurring, stated:
“In one sense it is true that no money can be compensation for life or the enjoyment of life, and in that sense it is impossible to fix compensation for the shortening of fife. But it is the best the law can do. It would be paradoxical if the law refused to give any compensation at all because none could be adequate.” [1937] A. C., at 848.
It has been suggested that one reason the common-law rule was tolerated in England as long as it was may have been that the relatives of persons killed by wrongful acts often were able to exact
See also National Parks Act, 16 U. S. C. § 457; Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, 43 U. S. C. §§ 1331-1343 (making state wrongful-death statutes applicable to particular areas within federal jurisdiction) . Cf. n. 16, infra.
The Rock case involved the question whether an action for wrongful death was maintainable in the Panama Canal Zone, under a general statute that simply embodied the civil-law principle of liability for damage caused by fault. The majority’s decision, engrafting onto this statute the common-law rule forbidding such recovery despite the fact that the rule had then been rejected by every relevant jurisdiction, was immediately repudiated by congressional action. Act of Dee. 29, 1926, § 7, 44 Stat. 927; see Landis, supra, at 227.
The general understanding was that the statutes of the coastal States, which provided remedies for deaths within territorial waters, did not apply beyond state boundaries. This Court had suggested, in an early case where the plaintiff and defendant were of the same State, that the law оf that State could be applied to a death on the high seas, if the State intended its law to have such scope.
The Hamilton,
In 1927 Congress passed the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, 44 Stat. 1424, 33 U. S. C. § 901
et seq.,
granting to longshoremen the right to receive workmen’s compensation benefits from their employers for accidental injury or death arising out of their employment. These benefits are made exclusive of any other liability for employers who comply with the Act. The Act does not, however, affect the longshoreman’s remedies against persons other than his employer, such as a shipowner, and therefore
A joint contributor to this last situation, in conjunction with the rule of
The Harrisburg,
is the decision in
Gillespie
v.
United States Steel Corp.,
Similarly, when Parliament abrogated the English common-law rule by passing Lord Campbell’s Act, it provided that “nothing therein contained shall apply to that Part of the United Kingdom called Scotland.” 9 & 10 Viet., c. 93, §6 (1846). The decisional law of Scotland had long recognized a right to recover for wrongful death; thus the mischief at which the statute aimed could be cured without disturbing Scottish law. The Act “excluded Scotland from its operation because a sufficient remedy already existed there when in England none existed at all.” Admiralty Commissioners v. S. S. Amerika, [1917] A. C., at 52.
We note that § 1 of the Act, which authorizes “a suit for damages in the district courts of the United States, in admiralty,” has been construed to place exclusive jurisdiction on the admiralty side of the federal courts for suits under the Act,
e. g., Devlin
v.
Flying Tiger Lines, Inc.,
The incongruity of forcing the States to provide the sole remedy to effectuate duties that have no basis in state policy is highlighted in this case. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state wrongful-death act was concerned only with “traditional common-law concepts,” and not with “concepts peculiar to maritime law such as ‘unseaworthiness’ and the comparative negligence rule.” It found no reasоn to believe that the Florida Legislature intended to cover, or even considered, the “completely foreign” maritime duty of seaworthiness.
It is worth noting that this problem of lack of congruence between maritime duties and state remedies was not presented in
The Harrisburg.
The problem there was that the relevant state statutes of limitations had run, and petitioner sought a federal remedy to which they would not be applicable. The Court did not discuss the standards of behavior comprehended by the state law or by
Respondents purport to find such a preclusive intent in two other federal statutes in related areas, the National Parks Act, 16 U. S. C. § 457, and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, 43 U. S. C. §§ 1331-1343. The former provides: “In the case of the death of any person by the neglect or wrongful act of another within a national park or other place subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, within the exterior boundaries of any State, such right of action shall exist as though the place were under the jurisdiction of the State within whose exterior boundaries such place may be . . . .” Although Judge Learned Hand once suggested that this statute applied to admiralty,
Puleo
v.
H. E. Moss & Co.,
The latter statute was before this Court in
Rodrigue
v.
Aetna Cas. & Sur. Co., supra. We
there determined that the Act was intended to treat artificial islands, located beyond the three-mile limit, not as vessels upon the high seas, but “as though they were federal enclaves in an upland State.” Because the Act “deliberately eschewed the application of admiralty principles to these
Respondents point out that a bill has been introduced in the United States Senate, by request, which would, among other things, extend the Death on the High Seas Act to include deaths in state territorial waters. S. 3143, 91st Cong., 1st Sess. To date no hearings have been scheduled or other action taken on the bill. The mere possibility of future legislation in this field does not, of course, affect the legal merits of petitioner’s claim that the rule of
The Harrisburg
is no longer a valid part of maritime law. See
United, States
v.
W. M. Webb, Inc.,
Nor do we think that Congress’ failure to take action on the pending bill, or to pass a similar measure over the years as the law of deaths on territorial waters became more incongruous, provides guidance for the course we should take in this case. To conclude that Congress, by not legislating on this subject, has in effect foreclosed, by negative legislation as it were, reconsideration of prior judicial doctrine would be to disregard the fact that “Congress has largely left to this Court the responsibility for fashioning the controlling rules of admiralty law.”
Fitzgerald
v.
United States Lines Co.,
See
McAllister
v.
Magnolia Petroleum Co.,
46 U. S. C. § 763.
46 U. S. C. §§ 761, 762.
45 U. S. C. § 51; see 46 U. S. C. § 688.
33 U. S. C. § 909. See n. 11, supra.
46 U. S. C. § 761.