Comment by Victoria L.C. Holstein
In maritime personal injury law, the task of identifying to whom these “peculiar” entitlements and obligations attach requires factfinders to navigate a labyrinth of status-based tests intended to channel sea-based and land-based workers into separate statutory avenues of recovery. While the Jones Act affords seamen a negligence action against their employers in addition to their traditional maritime claims for maintenance and cure and vessel unseaworthiness, the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (LHWCA) exclusively limits employer liability for injured maritime workers who are not “masters or members of a crew” to no-fault workers' compensation. Consequently, regardless of whether two maritime employees sustain the same injuries in the course of performing the same duties, their seaman status determines the availability of enhanced remedies designed to offset the “special hazards and disadvantages” encountered by those regularly exposed to the perils of the sea. Although the LHWCA, by its terms, excludes any “master or member of a crew,” reserving the Jones Act remedy to seamen, the current liberal construction of both statutes in favor of coverage to achieve their benevolent policy objectives has eroded the perceived impermeable boundary between sea- and shore-based workers and, consequently, their corresponding remedial schemes.
When asked to resolve the “jurisdictional dilemma” created by two statutes that are mutually exclusive in “substantive theory” but ostensibly share overlapping spheres of coverage, the Supreme Court in Southwest Marine, Inc. v. Gizoni unequivocally established that “some maritime workers may be Jones Act seamen performing a job specifically enumerated under the LHWCA.” Under what circumstances may this amorphous maritime worker pursue a Jones Act remedy after receiving LHWCA compensation, which, at least implicitly, deems him a nonseaman? Under Gizoni, the receipt of voluntarily paid LHWCA benefits will not automatically bar a claimant from subsequently pursuing a Jones Act claim unless there is no factual basis to support a finding of seaman status. To preclude a Jones Act claim, at a minimum, the jurisdictional issue of seaman status must have been “actually litigated” and have resulted in a “formal award.” Having defined neither term, the Supreme Court has left open the possibility that administrative estoppel is appropriate, generating heated debate between the Fifth and Ninth Circuits surrounding the extent of judicial deference owed to a LHWCA administrative settlement or award, and whether such relief is final for the purposes of estoppel. Moreover, in the analogous context of state workers' compensation, the Second Circuit has ruled that a formal award of benefits that settles all claims in their entirety might waive a Jones Act suit in certain circumstances.
This Comment proposes that the administrative estoppel standard articulated by the Supreme Court in Astoria Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n v. Solimino, just six months prior to Gizoni, should compel the Court to conclude that the application of judicially created preclusion principles to a LHWCA administrative determination of nonseaman status contravenes Supreme Court jurisprudence, congressional intent, and the maritime tort policy objectives underlying the two remedial statutes. Part II of this Comment traces the historical evolution of federal statutory remedial coverage for maritime workers to illustrate the emergence of a functional overlap between the Jones Act and the LHWCA. Part III closely examines the Supreme Court's methodology in Gizoni. In Part IV, this Comment analyzes LHWCA administrative fact-finding and appellate review and discusses the doctrines of res judicata, collateral estoppel, and administrative estoppel. Part V explains the current debate surrounding the proper construction of Gizoni by comparing the resultant divergent approaches to Jones Act preclusion taken by the Fifth and Ninth Circuits with the Second Circuit's waiver analysis. Part VI discusses the application of Astoria to resolve the preclusion issue in favor of the approach taken by the Ninth Circuit, which would prevent arbitrarily denying dual-status seamen and claimants erroneously deemed nonseamen access to the Jones Act remedy. Finally, this Comment concludes that the disparate approaches taken by the Second, Fifth, and Ninth Circuits create a need for the Supreme Court to clarify the preclusion issue that merited its grant of certiorari but was ultimately mooted in Harbor Tug & Barge Co. v. Papai.
About the Author
Victoria L.C. Holstein. J.D. candidate 2002, Tulane Law School; A.B. 1993, Brown University.
Citation
76 Tul. L. Rev. 783 (2002)