Mr. Justice RUTLEDGE, dissenting.
I agree with Mr. Justice JACKSON that, when Congress gave shipowners the privilege of limiting their liability and conditioned that privilege, in the alternative, upon turning over the vessel and freight for the benefit of claimants or depositing with the court cash or approved security of equivalent value, it meant exactly what it wrote into the statute concerning the amount of the security to be given.
Nothing in the statute's wording, purpose, or legislative history is cited or exists to justify rewriting 'a sum equal to the amount or value of the interest of such owner in the vessel and freight,' so as to make that wording read 'a sum equal to one-third the value of the interest of such owner when that amount possibly but by no means certainly will be the limit of his substantive liability after the claims against him are finally determined.'
The most appealing argument put forward to support this statutory distortion is petitioners' wholly specious plea of resulting 'injustice' if the judicial revision is not made. The plea is founded altogether upon petitioners' assumption that their view of the extent of their aggregate possible liability will prevail, when the time comes for deciding that question.
Petitioners' view is that the lex loci delicti governs both the existence and the extent of their liability in this case. That law is the law of Belgium, because the collision here involved took place in Belgian waters. Mo eover, since Belgium ratified the Brussels Convention of August 25, 1924, that Convention is claimed to be controlling of the resulting substantive liability. This, because the aggregate limit the Convention prescribes comes to only some $325,000 in this case and that limit, so it is argued, attaches to the right of recovery as part of the right, not merely as a matter of remedy. See Slater v. Mexican National R. Co., 194 U.S. 120, 24 S.Ct. 581, 48 L.Ed. 900; Cf. Smith v. Condry, 1 How. 28, 33, 11 L.Ed. 35; Cuba R. Co. v. Crosby, 222 U.S. 473, 32 S.Ct. 132, 56 L.Ed. 274, 38 L.R.A.,N.S., 40; American Banana Co. v. United Fruit Co., 213 U.S. 347, 29 S.Ct. 511, 53 L.Ed. 826, 16 Ann.Cas. 1047.
Hence, it is urged petitioner Black Diamond satisfied the requirements of Rev.Stat. § 4285, as amended, for limitation of liability, when it deposited an approved bond for $325,000, rather than one in the amount of $1,000,000, the value of the owner's interest in the vessel and freight, as § 4285 in terms requires. The conclusion is grounded on the 'injustice' which petitioners say would result if one substantively liable for only $325,000 were required to post bond in three times that amount in order to have the advantage of limitation. This, it is said, would mean forcing such an owner to pay bond premiums three times larger than necessary to discharge all his liabilities, an 'injustice' it is argued Congress cannot have contemplated notwithstanding its clear and unambiguous language.
Even if petitioners' assumption concerning their ultimate liability should turn out to be true, the statutory command is clear and unequivocal: Turn over the ship and the freight or their value as the price of limitation. In this command Congress was concerned not at all with the extent of aggregate claims or liabilities. It was concerned only with affording the owner a chance to limit his liabilities, but at the same time allowing this privilege only on precise and fixed conditions for giving security to his creditors in the amount specified. This was unrelated to the amount of the liabilities in the aggregate, whether above or below the maximum fixed by the statute.
That Congress intended the same maximum and the same security for claimants, regardless of the alternative mode chosen for giving the security, is shown by the very alternatives themselves. They are equivalents. There was no intent to permit less security to be given when the owner elects to give the statutory substitutes than when he turns over the ship. Correlatively there was no intention to give him the limitation for less cost or on more advantageous terms in the one case than in the other. The provision for substituting money or security for the ship had no purpose or function to correlate the bond required with the amount of the ultimate aggregate substantive liabilities which seldom can be known in advance of their final determination. The alternative mode's purpose was only to permit the owner to release the ship and continue it in active business use, provided he substituted its equivalent in value, not some lesser sum, for it.