Cite as: 511 U. S. 202 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
$470,000." Ibid. It treated this figure as the maximum that could be recovered from the nonsettling defendants. Because it was less than River Don's liability as found by the jury (38% of $2.1 million or $798,000), it directed the entry of judgment against River Don in that amount. Ibid.
Because we have not previously considered how a settlement with less than all of the defendants in an admiralty case should affect the liability of nonsettling defendants, and because the Courts of Appeals have adopted different approaches to this important question, we granted certiorari. 509 U. S. 921 (1993).
II
Although Congress has enacted significant legislation in the field of admiralty law,7 none of those statutes provides us with any "policy guidance" or imposes any limit on our authority to fashion the rule that will best answer the question presented by this case. See Miles v. Apex Marine Corp., 498 U. S. 19, 27 (1990). We are, nevertheless, in familiar waters because "the Judiciary has traditionally taken the lead in formulating flexible and fair remedies in the law maritime." United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., 421 U. S. 397, 409 (1975).
In the Reliable Transfer case we decided to abandon a rule that had been followed for over a century in assessing damages when both parties to a collision are at fault. We replaced the divided damages rule, which required an equal division of property damage whatever the relative degree of fault may have been, with a rule requiring that damages be assessed on the basis of proportionate fault when such an allocation can reasonably be made. Although the old rule avoided the difficulty of determining comparative degrees of
7 See, e. g., Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, 33 U. S. C. §§ 901-950; Death on the High Seas Act, 46 U. S. C. §§ 761-768; Public Vessels Act, 46 U. S. C. §§ 781-790.
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