United States v. West of England Ship Owner's Mutual Protection & Indemnity Ass'n (Luxembourg)’s Empirical Analysis
872 F.2d 1192 · 1989
Citation profile
8 federal appellate · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently June 2014
8 federal appellate · 1 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 33 U.S.C. § 1321
Relies on Anderson v. City of Bessemer City · Blum v. Stenson · Consumer Product Safety Commission v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. · American Tobacco Co. v. Patterson · California v. Southland Royalty Co.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The committee determined ... that some form of absolute liability should be imposed... . ... [Marine] [i]nsurance ... has been designed to protect people who either work for, use, own or operate a vessel. Were this the case with oil pollution, the imposition of liability based on negligence would not be questioned. However, the discharge of oil can and usually does affect the general public, and persons and property wholly unrelated to the vessel, who have no control over it. The public interest, it can be argued, can be completely protected only by absolute and unlimited liability; negligent and limited liability should protect only private interests... . Under absolute liability with limits, a vessel owner would be absolutely liable regardless of fault, but the injured party would be limited in the amount of the damages which could be collected. This approach avoids the difficult, if not impossible, task of proving negligence or rebutting the case for non-negligence made by the vessel owner. It also places the risk on the responsible party, not on the general public.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Except where an owner or operator can prove that a discharge was caused solely by (A) an act of God, (B) an act of war, (C) negligence on the part of the United States Government, or (D) an act or omission of a third party without regard to whether any such act or omission was or was not negligent, or any combination of the foregoing clauses, such owner or operator of any vessel from which oil or a hazardous substance is discharged ... [shall] be liable to the United States Government for the actual costs incurred under subsection (c) ... for the removal of such oil or substance... .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.