Marine Cooks & Stewards v. Panama Steamship Co.

Upon the complaint of appellees the trial court issued an order enjoining appellants from conducting certain alleged picketing activities. On the appeal lodged in this court we have had two hearings.

At the first hearing appellants rested their contentions on lack of jurisdiction of the trial court to issue the temporary injunction because of the prohibition contained in the Norris-LaGuardia Act, 47 Stat. 70 (1932), 29 U.S.C.A. § 101 et seq. (1956).

On the second hearing their contention was broadened to include an assertion of a lack of statutory basis for the district court to consider this action at all on the civil side either as to the injunction or the claim for damages, which latter claim is still pending below.

The essential facts follow.

The S. S. Nikolos, a vessel registered under the Liberian flag and owned by ap-pellee Panama Steamship Company Ltd., a foreign corporation, arrived in Tacoma Harbor in the State of Washington during the early morning hours of June 10, 1957. Its master, oificers and crew were aliens. The time-charterer, appellee Sea-tankers, Inc., is not a citizen of the United States.

The ship was carrying a cargo of bulk salt loaded at a port on the…

(concurring).

The main problem here, as I see it, is whether what was said in Romero v. International Terminal, U.S., 79 S.Ct. 468 , requires a holding that Section 1331 of Title 28 does not confer jurisdiction on the court below.

I think Romero, in holding that Section 1331 does not give jurisdiction to a Federal District Court, sitting at law, over a seaman’s claims against his employer for a maritime tort, did not arrive at that conclusion because the authors of the Act of 1875 which set up the provisions here relevant could not then envision that some day it would be held, as in Pope & Talbot, Inc. v. Hawn, 346 U.S. 406 , 74 S.Ct. 202, 206 , 98 L.Ed. 143 , that the right there upheld was a “federal right of recovery.” It seems self evident that when the Act of 1875 spoke of suits arising “under the Constitution or laws of the United States”, it was not speaking only of suits conceived of by the Act’s authors in 1875 as federal rights of recovery. The Act of course looked to the future.

The basis for Romero was quite different. As I read it, it proceeds upon the thesis that the 1875 Act did not contemplate inclusion therein of the “long established, smoothly functioning”…