Cite as: 513 U. S. 527 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
tionale for the jurisdiction does not support it. If the tort produces no potential threat to maritime commerce or occurs during activity lacking a substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity, Sisson assumes that the objectives of admiralty jurisdiction probably do not require its exercise, even if the location test is satisfied. If, however, the Sisson tests are also satisfied, it is not apparent why the need for admiralty jurisdiction in aid of maritime commerce somehow becomes less acute merely because land-based parties happen to be involved. Certainly Congress did not think a land-based party necessarily diluted the need for admiralty jurisdiction or it would have kept its hands off the primitive location test.
Of course, one could claim it to be odd that under Sisson a land-based party (or more than one) may be subject to admiralty jurisdiction, but it would appear no less odd under the city's test that a maritime tortfeasor in the most traditional mould might be subject to state common-law jurisdiction. Other things being equal, it is not evident why the first supposed anomaly is worse than the second. But other things are not even equal. As noted just above, Congress has already made the judgment, in the Extension Act, that a land-based victim may properly be subject to admiralty jurisdiction. Surely a land-based joint tortfeasor has no claim to supposedly more favorable treatment.
Nor are these the only objections to the city's position. Contrary to what the city suggests, City Brief 10, 14-15, 25- 26, 30, exercise of federal admiralty jurisdiction does not result in automatic displacement of state law. It is true that, "[w]ith admiralty jurisdiction comes the application of substantive admiralty law." East River S. S. Corp. v. Trans-america Delaval Inc., 476 U. S. 858, 864 (1986). But, to characterize that law, as the city apparently does, as "federal rules of decision," City Brief 15, is
"a destructive oversimplification of the highly intricate interplay of the States and the National Government in
545
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