Schooner Accidents

An injury aboard a commercial schooner is subject to the admiralty law of maritime personal injuries. That means whether the ship (or owner) is liable for the injury depends in large part on the status of the injured person.

Was the injured person a paid crewmember, often called a “Jones Act Seaman”? If so, the remedies of Jones Act Negligence and Unseaworthiness apply, with their generous damages. And in the case of Jones Act Negligence, the injured person need only show that the negligence was even a slight cause of the injury, a far easier burden than on land. The injured person’s burden of proof in Unseaworthiness is even easier, for the remedy is nearly strict liability. The owner need not even know of the dangerous condition to be held liable.

Was the injured person a guest, or an employee who was not regular crew? In that event the owner owed that person a duty to use reasonable care to avoid the injury, similar to land-law. Damages, however, are generous.

The question of whether a paid person was or was not a Jones Act Seaman is subtle. A crewmember is a Jones Act seaman only if the crewmember’s connection to the ship is “substantial”, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, 515 U.S. 347, 368 (1995) is the leading case:

[A] seaman must have a connection to a vessel in navigation (or to
an identifiable group of such vessels) that is substantial in terms of both its duration and its nature. The fundamental purpose of this substantial connection requirement is . . . to separate the sea-based maritime employees who are entitled to Jones Act protection from those land-based workers who have only a transitory or sporadic connection to a vessel in navigation, and therefore whose employment does not regularly expose them to the perils of the sea.

Many, many words have been written to flesh out this paragraph, but it is possible to offer rules of thumb. Fundamentally, the inquiry is to determine whether the plaintiff is truly a member of the vessel’s crew or only a land-based employee who happened to be working on the vessel when injured.

As an initial matter, 46 U.S.C. §10101(3) excludes from the definition of seaman scientific personnel, sailing school instructors, and sailing school students. Particularly as regards scientific personnel, there is nuance and there are important exceptions.

Assuming the person is not excluded by definition, to qualify as a Jones Act seaman the work on board must contribute to the function of the ship. This factor is meant to weed out, say, the captain’s brother-in-law who is on board from time to time, doing no real work, or the oil rig mechanic for whom the ship is mere transportation. But there is no issue that regular crew – whether cook, bartender, master or deckhand – all contribute to the function of the ship.

Second, and typically more critically, the seaman must, at least in the ordinary case, work 30% of his or her total work hours in the service of the ship. The 30% rule originated in the Fifth Circuit, the most influential circuit for Admiralty law, and in Chandris the Supreme Court wrote “Generally, the Fifth Circuit seems to have identified an appropriate rule of thumb for the ordinary case: A worker who spends less than about 30 percent of his time in the service of a vessel in navigation should not qualify as a seaman under the Jones Act.”

I have written on this subject at length elsewhere, and invite you to the article “The Jones Act Plaintiff”, under Articles on this site.

You may reach me at (207) 838-0690.