The Supreme Court just handed down its decision in Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd. v. Regal-Beloit Corp., here.

This case involved the interplay between the Carriage of Goods at Sea Act (COGSA) and the Carmack Amendment which relates to cargo on rail carriers.  My earlier post here, here, and here.

I’m …

The Ninth Circuit just issued an unpublished decision in a Jones Act case.  Not precedential, and pretty sparse analysis, but it does set out the standards for surviving summary judgment motions for Jones Act seamen.  The case is Ili v. American Seafoods Co., LLC and can be found  here.

Facts:  seaman on a fishing vessel is injured near the end of his sixteen hour shift.  He claims unseaworthiness under common law and Jones Act negligence.

Issue:  were there issues of disputed fact warranting a jury trial on the seaman’s claims?  As is the case in all civil litigation in federal courts, claims cannot be summarily decided upon disputed facts.  Facts are found by juries (or judges) after a trial.

Jones Act Claim

Ili’s Jones Act claim has four elements: (1) the employer’s duty to provide a safe work environment to its seaman employee; (2) breach of that duty; (3) the employer’s awareness of the unsafe condition; and (4) a causal link, however slight, between the breach and the seaman’s injury.

The parties did not dispute that Ili was a Jones Act seaman and that we was injured after working sixteen hour shifts, seven days a week for months on end, rather seaman’s employer challenged whether shift length can be a condition amounting to unseaworthiness and whether the long shift caused seaman’s injury.

Employer put on evidence that fishing industry custom is 12, 14 and 16 hour shifts.  Custom, citing to the great Learned Hand, does not show a LACK of negligence and the court found that such long shifts could be negligence.  As such, the issue needed to be tried, not summarily disposed.

Unseaworthiness Claim

Ili’s unseaworthiness claim has four elements: (1) seaman status triggering the warranty of seaworthiness; (2) an injury arising from the condition of the ship or its crew; (3) the unseaworthiness of that condition; and (4) proximate causation between the unseaworthy condition and the injury.

The court stated that lack of adequate crew can give rise to an unseaworthiness claim.  Unseaworthiness has a higher standard for claimants to show causation, but the court found that the same facts (long shift) that defeated employer’s summary judgment motion on the Jones Act claim applied to the unseaworthiness claim.

Let a trial be had.

New admiralty / maritime case from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  It is unpublished and is of restricted precedential value, but it presents a neat, concise fact pattern to illuminate some issues that are frequently seen in maritime litigation.

The case is Sinotrans Container Lines Co. v. N. China Cargo Servs. and can be…

I don’t blog about criminal cases often, but this one was interesting.

Is a crewman’s stateroom his castle?

Or, more specifically, is a stateroom enough like a home that the Fourth Amendment should require heightened suspicion before permitting a warrantless border search?

New case from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the scope of…

New developments in the antitrust, class action lawsuit pending in Seattle:  an Amended Complaint was filed. (My earlier post on why the court dismissed the original complaint).  The Amended Complaint is available for download here.  (H/T to Joe the Plumber for the tip).

This case stems from the criminal convictions of several officials of a shipping …

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck (Donald, friend of Mickey?…Ok, just go with it), and quacks like a duck…it must be a duck.

So, if it looks like a yacht, sounds like a yacht, but doesn’t have engines and is in a dry-dock, is it a vessel for the purposes of the maritime lien statute, and more importantly, for in rem jurisdiction?

A new admiralty case from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals answers this question:  YES.  The case is Crimson Yachts v. Betty Lyn II Motor Yacht and can be found here.

Practitioners Note:  This case has a very comprehensive history of the Maritime Lien Act, 46 U.S.C. §§ 31341–31343.

The facts of this case are simple.  Yacht goes into dry-dock for extensive renovations.  After some time and repairs, the owner stops paying.  So, is a high and dry yacht, without engines, props, furniture, generators, etc still a vessel for the purposes of the maritime lien act and in rem jurisdiction?

The court explained the applicable test:

In deciding whether a watercraft is a vessel, “the focus . . . is the craft’s capability, not its present use or station.” Bd. of Comm’rs of the Orleans Levee Dist. v. M/V Belle of Orleans, 535 F.3d 1299, 1310 (11th Cir. 2008). The dispositive question is “whether the watercraft’s use as a means of transportation on water is a practical possibility or merely a theoretical one.” Id. (quoting Stewart, 543 U.S. at 496, 125 S. Ct. at 1118) (quotation marks omitted); Cain v. Transocean Offshore USA, Inc., 518 F.3d 295, 300 (5th Cir. 2008); see also Holmes v. Atlanta Sounding Co., 437 F.3d 441, 448 (5th Cir. 2006) (“Under § 3, a ‘vessel’ is watercraft practically capable of maritime transportation regardless of its primary purpose or state of transit at a particular moment(quotations omitted)).

So, despite removal of her engines and the renovations, the yacht remained a vessel.  Ergo, the Maritime Lien statute applied and the dry-dock was entitled to arrest the vessel in rem to satisfy its lien.