holding that a seaman was “on [his employer’s] business while returning from shore leave, because shore leave for the crew is beneficial and necessary to [the employer’s] continued operation”
How later courts described this case
- holding that a seaman was “on [his employer’s] business while returning from shore leave, because shore leave for the crew is beneficial and necessary to [the employer’s] continued operation”
- holding that the Jones Act “ ‘is entitled to a liberal construction to accomplish its beneficent purposes’ ”
- “Thus, because Daughenbaugh was required to return to the ship before the appointed sailing time, he was acting in the course of his employment when, en route to the M/V Foy, he disap peared on the dock.”
- plaintiff's unseaworthiness claim failed under traditional proximate cause analysis, but her Jones Act claim withstood more liberal causation standard unique to Jones Act and FELA.
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
ENGEL, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur fully in the result and in most of the analysis contained in Judge Keith’s very comprehensive and thoughtful opinion. Likewise, while I agree that the facts on motion for summary judgment are to be construed most stringently against the moving party, I am unable to join in the more generalized factual conclusions contained in the last two paragraphs of Part III. I would not necessarily conclude from the proofs before the district court that Beaudoin and Chirkun did no more than take a “cavalier walk” around the conveyor house, nor that they are automatically to be faulted for having failed to take charge of an intoxicated Daughenbaugh so that he would not flee. This seems to imply an absolute duty as a matter of law, a duty which a jury could easily find that reasonable persons in their position could not have performed. I also cannot conclude that their search was not comprehensive, any more than I can conclude that it was comprehensive. Further, I am unable to conclude that they are to be faulted automatically for failing to immediately notify the ship’s captain when the conduct they encountered could occur every time a person did not show up on time. These are all conclusions a jury could reach under the facts. However, a jury could also conclude upon the same evidence that Beaudoin and Chirkun did everything they reasonably could do under the circumstances as they appeared to them at the time, including searching, notifying the captain, and requesting their fellow seamen to keep an eye out for Daughenbaugh should he return to the President’s Bar.
Likewise, reasonable minds might assign different credibility to the testimony of Stariha that Daughenbaugh reappeared at the President’s Bar. Cases often arise where seemingly undisputed facts, individ *1211 ually challenged, raise internal conflicts and are the subject of differing inferences.