Reed v. Pennsylvania Railroad Company/Dissent Frankfurter

by Felix Frankfurter

United States Supreme Court

351 U.S. 502

Reed  v.  Pennsylvania Railroad Company

 Argued: May 1, 1956. --- Decided: June 11, 1956

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER, with whom Mr. Justice REED and Mr. Justice HARLAN join, dissenting.

Dissenters are not empowered to define the scope of a decision, but the way they read it may induce dissent. So it is with what the Court has here written. The opinion does not state in terms that the Amendment of August 11, 1939, 53 Stat. 1404, to the Federal Employers' Liability Act of April 22, 1908, 35 Stat. 65, has so drastically changed the limited scope of that Act to those employees of an interstate carrier who are, more or less, directly concerned with its transportation operations as to make it reach all the employees of such interstate carrier whom Congress in the exercise of its constitutional power to regulate commerce may cover. I say the Court does not explicitly hold this, but it does hold that a clerical employee is covered by the terms of the Act because a 'part' of her duties is in 'furtherance' of interstate commerce. The Court reads the Amendment of 1939 to the Act of 1908 in a merely lexicographical sense. 'Furtherance' means anything that furthers or helps forward; the petitioner was certainly charged with tasks that furthered or helped to forward the business of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, a carrier engaged in interstate commerce; ergo, the petitioner, having been injured while 'employed by such carrier in such commerce', has a right of action under the Amendment to the Employers' Liability Act.

Were the Court to be as explicit as this, it would at least not open the door, as this decision inevitably does, to new litigation. It is not a juristic requirement that decisions be carried to their logical consequences. It is equally true that capricious distinctions should not be made. Yet they are invited when the rationale of a decision is left, if not cloudy, certainly unlimited. For myself, I do not see how the clerical employee here 'furthers' the business of the Pennsylvania any more than do all the other clerical employees of the Pennsylvania, and the thousands upon thousands of clerical employees on the various railroads throughout the country, even though there may be differences in salary and hierarchical importance among such employees.

Accordingly, clerical employees and other obviously non-transportation employees of railroads will bring suits under the Federal Employers' Liability Act when recovery thereunder will, by the law of chance, appear to lawyers advising them to be more advantageous than awards obtainable under state workmen's compensation acts. Indeed, if some employees may seek to avail themselves, for one reason or another, of a state workmen's compensation act, a carrier may resist, under the doctrine of New York Central R. Co. v. Winfield, 244 U.S. 147, 37 S.Ct. 546, 61 L.Ed. 1045, by urging the exclusiveness of a remedy under the Federal Employers' Liability Act. Conversely, if suit is brought under that Act, carriers will doubtless resist, as they have in the past, on the ground that the particular clerical employee is not 'furthering' its business sufficiently to constitute 'furtherance' as intended by the Court in this case. It is not a silly exercise in prophecy to foretell that just as a mass, if indeed not a mess, of cases came before this Court prior to the 1939 Amendment, when the Court gave a much too constricted scope to the Act (see cases collected in Frankfurter and Landis, The Business of the Supreme Court, pp. 207-208), so a new series of sterile litigation will be stimulated by this decision.

I part company with the Court not in its reading of English but in its assumption that the construction of the Amendment to the Federal Employers' Liability Act is merely a matter of reading English. The Act of August 11, 1939, is the last in a series of consistently developing statutes. As such, it is an organism, projected into the future out of its past. It is not merely a collection of words for abstract annotation out of the dictionary. The process of judicial construction must be mindful of the history of the legislation, of the purpose which infused it, of the difficulties which were encountered in effectuating this purpose, of the aims of those most active in relieving these difficulties. Above all, we should be mindful of the central concern of the body of enactments that constitute the Federal Employers' Liability Act throughout all the vicissitudes of the legislation. It would be redundant to detail these considerations in view of Judge Goodrich's opinion below. 3 Cir., 227 F.2d 810. A few additional observations are pertinent.

Of course, the Act of 1939 sought to remove hindrances that had revealed themselves in subjecting carriers to liability for injuries due to negligence. But the preoccupation of the whole course of this legislation was with protection to those who were peculiarly exposed to injuries because of the nature of their occupation, i.e., the hazardous business of railroading. A very important obstacle to recovery was the doctrine of the assumption of risk as part of the general law of negligence that was made the basis of the federal right. Congress abolished asssumption of risk as a defense. See Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 318 U.S. 54, 63 S.Ct. 444, 87 L.Ed. 610. Another great difficulty derived from this Court's construction of the Commerce Clause whereby it confined application of the Federal Employers' Liability Act to injuries sustained by an employee if at the moment of injury his work was related to interstate transportation. This mode of approach derived from the Employers' Liability Cases, Howard v. Illinois Central R. Co., 287 U.S. 463, 28 S.Ct. 141, 52 L.Ed. 297, and the Second Employers' Liability Cases, Mondou v. New York, N.H. & Hartford R. Co., 223 U.S. 1, 32 S.Ct. 169, 56 L.Ed. 327, and produced a series of decisions which led Judge Learned Hand to say 'The cases are full of casuistry * * *.' Central R. Co. of New Jersey v. Monahan, 2 Cir., 11 F.2d 212, 213.

I agree with the Court in finding that the '1939 amendment was designed to obliterate fine distinctions'; but they were made by courts only in relation to employees who worked in the context of the hazardous business of transportation. The amendatory legislation was addressed to judicial distinctions affecting these transportation workers that bore no practical relation to the essential conditions of their employment; these distinctions never touched others in a totally different category of employment because the Federal Employers' Liability Act never remotely applied to them. In order to obliterate such 'fine distinctions,' it is not necessary to jump over the moon and wipe out the basic distinction between those whose duties are tied to transportation, whatever may have been their precise work at the moment of injury, and those employees who are exposed by way of permanent occupation to no greater or different potential hazards than are the thousands upon thousands of like workers in offices other than those of railroads whom Congress has left to remedies under state law. It was on the presupposition of this cardinal distinction between transportation and non-transportation employees of railroads that the Federal Employers' Liability Act was amended in 1939. To make it apply to clerical workers who 'further,' in a dictionary sense of the term, the interstate commerce business of railroads would have as much justification, but no more, as it would have for Congress to pass a Federal Employers' Liability Act for all employees who further large enterprises in the conduct of their interstate commerce. The whole course of history of the Federal Employers' Liability Act as well as due regard for the text of the Amendment of 1939, in its entire context, calls for affirmance of the decision below.

Notes