Admiralty loss-splitting and jury-free judging paralleled covert jury tort reasoning

Evidence

Meanwhile, the Harter Act, passed by Congress in 1893, excused the “owner of any vessel transporting merchandise or property” from “damage or loss resulting from faults or errors in navigation, or in the management” of the ship, or for “losses arising from dangers of the sea … acts of God, or public enemies,” so long as the owner had exercised “due diligence” in making his ship “in all respects seaworthy and properly manned, equipped, and supplied.” The concept of “seaworthiness” was to prove as plastic as that of “negligence.” But this long legal voyage lay ahead. There were strong parallels between admiralty and tort law, despite their traditional differences. Even the loss-​splitting concept, so foreign to the common law, was perhaps more a difference in style than in substance. Admiralty, after all, had no jury. What the jury did secretly, in the holds and fastnesses of its chamber, admiralty judges had to do aboveboard, on open deck. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3154

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing insight that admiralty and tort law produced strikingly similar loss-allocation outcomes, with judges performing openly what juries did secretly, reframes how legal forms and substantive results relate across fields.
• DEFINE: Sharply defines the Harter Act’s due-diligence seaworthiness standard and the plastic legal concept of seaworthiness.