Supreme Court: Coming In Out of the Rain

Supreme Court Watchers, devoted to a spectator sport even more decorous than cricket or chess-by-mail, broke out in a buzz of raised eyebrows last week. In a rare combination, liberal Justice William O. Douglas joined conservative John Marshall Harlan in a dissent against the rest of the Court. Their seven colleagues had reversed the Utah Supreme Court to reinstate a jury’s award of $10,000 to injured Railroad Worker Claude Dennis. For Justice Douglas, it was the first time in many years that he had sided against such a jury award to an injured worker.

Dennis won his claim because he had lost two fingers to frostbite while repairing track in subfreezing weather. Outdoorsman Douglas huffed that he saw no evidence of employer negligence “in a society where everyone is presumed to have enough sense ‘to come in out of the rain.’ ” But Justice Harlan went further, to bring up a question which has divided the Court sharply: should the Supreme Court be taking such cases at all?

Most workmen’s compensation claims are settled administratively, and limited by fairly standard formulas. But under federal law, injured railroad workers and merchant seamen have the more elastic remedy of jury trials, and each year several such lawsuits find their way to the Supreme Court. The results are often bizarre. In 1957 the nation’s highest tribunal solemnly considered the claim of Railroad Engineer Boyd R. Ringhiser, who had been treating himself for constipation and then, unable to make it fast enough across a busy freight yard, relieved himself in a gondola car—where a load of steel plates suddenly shifted, crushing his leg. That same year, the Court took up the case of a ship’s baker who had grabbed a sharp knife instead of a scoop to serve hard ice cream and lost two fingers when the knife slipped. In both cases, the Supreme Court decided for the injured men.

In both cases, several Justices protested strongly that no matter how pitiful the individual instance, the Court should not concern itself with mere questions of fact that had been reviewed already by lower courts. All through the ’30s, Justice Louis Brandeis had maintained that position. In 1957 Justice Frankfurter’s impatience boiled up, and he refused to participate in any more such cases. In an angry dissent on the ice cream case and three others, he said: “The Court may or may not be ‘doing justice’ in the four insignificant cases it decided today; it certainly is doing injustice to the significant and important cases on the calendar and to its own role as the supreme judicial body of the country. If the court does not abide by its own rules, how can it expect the bar to do so?”