New 9th Cir. Admiralty Case - Pennsylvania Rule and Jones Act

The Ninth Circuit just published an opinion relating to the Jones Act and a worker injured while conducting a "free dive" incident to the employer's vessel operations.

The case is MacDonald v. Kahikolu, Ltd., No. 08-15239, download here.

In MacDonald, a vessel employee was injured while "free diving" to support anchoring of the vessel.  The U.S. Coast Guard does regulate diving from vessels, but such diving does not include "free diving." 

At issue in the appeal was to what extent the violation of Coast Guard safety regulations caused the injury to the plaintiff.  Supplementing that issue was to what extent do employers bear the burden of proof to establish causation.  The applicable precedent is The Pennsylvania, 86 U.S. (19 Wall.) 126 (1873).  The Pennsylvania Rule puts the burden of proof on ship owners to show that the violation of the regulation did not cause plaintiff's injury.

The Ninth Circuit noted that the origins of the Pennsylvania Rule were from vessel collision cases.  Simply put, if you are violating a navigation statute or regulation and a collision occurs, you bear the burden to prove that your conduct did not cause the plaintiff's injury.  In MacDonald, the ship owner was violating Coast Guard regulations by not having a diving supervisor onboard and not having an operations manual onboard the vessel.  But, the Court found that these regulatory violations did not cause the plaintiff's injuries.  While finding that the plaintiff did not even meet the threshold of proving that there was a causal connection between the violation and the injury, the court also declined to extend the Pennsylvania Rule to contexts outside of the collision one.

Comments

[Chip Lezy]

Aloha Mark - Thanks for an interesting and useful blog. I looked at this case with some interest because the holding impacts much of my work defending vessel owners/employers. I'd like to offer a slightly different read on the 9th Circuit's opinion. You mention that the Court declined to extend the Pennsylvania Rule to cases outside the collision context. I read the decision to indicate that the Court, although seemingly ciritical of the its application to Jones Act cases, declined to consider whether the Pennsylvania Rule applies outside the collision context. I would have preferred, frankly, that they had ruled on the issue one way or another. Seems to me they've just muddied the issue further. Thanks again for your work here. Aloha.