Spann v. Lauritzen’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

25 federal appellate · 5 district · 2 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““the hazards of marine service which unseaworthiness places on the men who perform it. * * *, together with their helplessness to ward off such perils and the harshness of forcing them to shoulder alone the resulting personal disability and loss, have been thought to justify and to require putting their burden, in so far as it is measurable in money, upon the owner regardless of his fault. * * * [T] he owner * * * is in position, as the worker is not, to distribute the loss in the shipping community which receives the service and should bear its cost. ****** “[T]his policy is not confined to seamen who perform the ship’s service under immediate hire to the owner, but extends to those who render it with his consent or by his arrangement. All the considerations which gave birth to the liability and have shaped its absolute character dictate that the owner should not be free to nullify it by parcelling out his operations to intermediary employers whose sole business is to take over portions of the ship’s work or by other devices which would strip the men performing its service of their historic protection. The risks themselves arise from and are incident in fact to the service. * * * [The owner’s] ability to distribute the loss over the industry is not lessened by the fact that the men who do the work are employed and furnished by another. Historically the work of loading and unloading is the work of the ship’s service, performed until recent times by members of the crew. * * Th”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Deffes v. Federal Barge Lines, Inc.

2. ““for the results of defects in unloading equipment brought on board ship by the stevedoring company should not be qualified or modified if the unloading equipment thus used happens to be newly designed and devised and involves none of the traditional unloading gear of the ship. Use of more modern equipment can no more exculpate the shipowner from his obligations than could use of ‘more modern divisions of labor.’ [Sieracki] It would seem passing strange of the shipowner, whose obligation of seaworthiness, as stated in Sieracki, ‘is peculiarly and exclusively the obligation of the owner * * *,’ could in effect delegate and avoid his obligation by employing a stevedoring company which used newly invented unloading devices.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Deffes v. Federal Barge Lines, Inc.

3. ““The term loading is not a word of art, and is not to be narrowly and hypertechnically interpreted. Plaintiffs’ actions at the time of the accident were direct, necessary steps in the physical transfer of the steel from the railroad car into the vessel which constituted the work of loading.” Litwinowicz v. Weyerhaeuser Steamship Co., 179 F.Supp. 812, 817-818 (E.D. Pa. 1959). 1”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Byrd v. American Export Isbrandtsen Lines, Inc.