The “Nature” of Seaman Status After Sanchez

The article discusses a U.S. Supreme Court case involving welder Gilbert Sanchez who filed a complaint against his employer, Smart Fabricators of Texas LLC, after he sustained an injury at work, including information on pre-en banc proceedings and the application of seaman status jurisprudence

The Medical/Legal/Human Disconnect in Cure Cases: A Proposal for Reform

The obligation of a vessel owner to provide a seaman with cure or medical treatment for injuries or conditions which were either caused by the seaman’s service of the ship or which manifested themselves during that service is of ancient origin. The obligation lasts until the seaman attains what the courts call maximum medical improvement, a medical decision, even if further treatment would ease the seaman’s pain or prevent relapse or degeneration of the seaman’s condition. Under the traditional rules, if medicine could not fix the seaman’s problem, then the obligation to provide cure ceased. These old rules are out of step with modern reality in several respects; they are relics of our past and while history can be a reliable guide in legal interpretation, it should not shackle legal evolution where significant change has occurred in society, science, or culture. How are the rules concerning cure out of step with the world today? First, the rule that the seaman can recover cure for a condition which manifests itself during the seaman’s service of the ship, but which was not caused by the seaman’s service of the ship, places a risk on the vessel owner which is not fairly attributable to its enterprise. Modern worker’s compensation schemes require a worker’s injury or illness to arise out of the employment, i.e., to be a risk fairly attributed to the employer. Moreover, with first-party medical insurance so much more available today than it was in the days when courts first defined the vessel owner’s obligation to provide cure, it is unlikely a seaman will go without treatment. Additionally, the rule that medical treatment that eases pain or prevents relapse or degeneration does not count as “cure” is inconsistent with developments in medicine, including developments in pain management and medicine’s increased emphasis on maintaining the quality of a patient’s life, not just eradicating a condition (or not). Thus, I propose limiting cure where a seaman’s medical condition is not caused by the seaman’s service of the ship. In that case, the vessel owner’s obligation to provide cure would cease upon a determination that the condition was not caused by the service of the ship. Additionally, I argue that if the seaman’s condition was caused by the service of the ship, the right to cure should include the right to recover for pain relief and anti-regression treatment. As a necessary by-product of my proposals, the law of admiralty should jettison the concept of maximum medical improvement

Sieracki Lives: A Portrait of the Interplay Between Legislation and the Judicially Created General Maritime Law

In American maritime law, the interplay between the courts and Congress is complex and iterative. A significant body of American admiralty law, the general maritime law, has been judicially created and developed. But Congress has also enacted a number of important statutes governing maritime commerce and the rights of maritime workers, such as the Longshore and Harbor Worker’s Compensation Act (“LHWCA”). The back and forth between the courts and Congress in interpreting those statutes and gauging their impact on and consistency with the general maritime law is ongoing. One important area where the courts development of the general maritime law intersects with statutory regulation involves so-called “Sieracki” seamen, workers who are not seamen per se of the vessel on which they are injured but who nevertheless may sue that vessel for a breach of the warranty of unseaworthiness because they are doing the ship’s work. In 1972, Congress amended the LHWCA to deprive workers covered by that Act from availing themselves of “Sieracki” seamen status and recovering for injuries caused by unseaworthiness. But, what about workers who are not covered by the LHWCA; may they still recover from the vessel for breach of the warranty of seaworthiness? The courts are split and the analysis of the problem presents a paradigm example of the back-and-forth that occurs in admiralty between the courts and Congress. That analytical undertaking reveals that the courts holding that “Sieracki” lives have the better side of the argument

Continued Conflation Confusion in Louisiana Negligence Cases: Duty and Breach

Negligence has five elements: duty, breach, cause-in-fact, scope of risk, and damages. Logic dictates that courts, lawyers, scholars, and law students should keep them separate. But they consistently fail to do so. Courts continue to conflate or collapse elements; they combine duty and scope of risk and they combine duty and breach. In combining duty and breach courts purport to determine duty based on the facts of the particular case but, in fact, they are really deciding a question of breach-whether the defendant exercised the care of a reasonable person under the circumstances. In conflating duty and breach courts are turning a mixed question of fact and law—breach—into a question of law. Concomitantly, those courts are taking the breach question away from the factfinder—often the jury--and improperly making it a judicial decision. Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. notoriously combined duty and breach in his writings and in his articulation of the short-lived stop, look, and listen at grade-crossings “rule.” Sadly, Louisiana courts have frequently followed Justice Holmes’ perilous lead and combined duty and breach in a number of significant instances. The most unfortunate line of jurisprudence manifesting this conflation of duty and breach is the Louisiana Supreme Court’s “open and obvious” risk cases. Herein, building on my prior work on separating duty and scope of risk, I review the jurisprudence from Holmes to the Louisiana open and obvious cases to other Louisiana decisions manifesting the same error. I propose that henceforward courts and scholars clearly separate duty and breach thereby properly allocating the breach decision to the factfinder, unless reasonable minds could disagree