536
Opinion of the Court
within the Act, the damage must be close in time and space to the activity that caused it: that it must occur "reasonably contemporaneously" with the negligent conduct and no "farther from navigable waters than the reach of the vessel, its appurtenances and cargo." Brief for Petitioner in No. 93- 1094, p. 45 (City Brief). For authority, they point to this Court's statement in Gutierrez, supra, that jurisdiction is present when the "impact" of the tortious activity "is felt ashore at a time and place not remote from the wrongful act." Id., at 210.2
The demerits of this argument lie not only in its want of textual support for its nonremoteness rule, but in its disregard of a less stringent but familiar proximity condition tied to the language of the statute. The Act uses the phrase "caused by," which more than one Court of Appeals has read as requiring what tort law has traditionally called "proximate causation." See, e. g., Pryor v. American President Lines, 520 F. 2d 974, 979 (CA4 1975), cert. denied, 423 U. S. 1055 (1976); Adams v. Harris County, 452 F. 2d 994, 996-997 (CA5 1971), cert. denied, 406 U. S. 968 (1972). This classic tort notion normally eliminates the bizarre, cf. Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N. Y. 339, 162 N. E. 99 (1928), and its use should obviate not only the complication but even the need for further temporal or spatial limitations. Nor is reliance on familiar proximate causation inconsistent with Gutierrez, which used its nonremote language, not to announce a special test, but simply to distinguish its own facts (the victim having slipped on beans spilling from cargo containers being unloaded from a ship) from what the Court called "[v]arious far-fetched hypotheticals," such as injury to someone slipping on beans that continue to leak from the
2 At oral argument, counsel for the city undercut this argument by conceding that admiralty jurisdiction would govern claims arising from an incident in which a ship on navigable waters slipped its moorings, drifted into a dam, and caused a breach in the dam that resulted in flooding of surrounding territory. Tr. of Oral Arg. 17.
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