546
Opinion of the Court
their regulation of maritime commerce. It is true that state law must yield to the needs of a uniform federal maritime law when this Court finds inroads on a harmonious system. But this limitation still leaves the States a wide scope." Romero v. International Terminal Operating Co., 358 U. S. 354, 373 (1959) (footnote omitted).
See East River, supra, at 864-865 ("Drawn from state and federal sources, the general maritime law is an amalgam of traditional common-law rules, modifications of those rules, and newly created rules" (footnote omitted)). Thus, the city's proposal to synchronize the jurisdictional enquiry with the test for determining the applicable substantive law would discard a fundamental feature of admiralty law, that federal admiralty courts sometimes do apply state law. See, e. g., American Dredging Co. v. Miller, 510 U. S. 443, 451-452 (1994); see also 1 S. Friedell, Benedict on Admiralty § 112, p. 7-49 (7th ed. 1994).6
6 We will content ourselves simply with raising a question about another of the city's assumptions, which does not go to anything dispositive for us. It is true that this Court has said that "the primary focus of admiralty jurisdiction is unquestionably the protection of maritime commerce," Foremost Ins. Co. v. Richardson, 457 U. S. 668, 674 (1982); see Sisson, 497 U. S., at 367; see id., at 364, n. 2, a premise that recently has been questioned, see Casto, The Origins of Federal Admiralty Jurisdiction in an Age of Privateers, Smugglers, and Pirates, 37 Am. J. Legal Hist. 117 (1993). However that may be, this Court has never limited the interest in question to the "protection of maritime commerce through uniform rules of decision," as the city would have it. City Brief 19. Granted, whatever its precise purpose, it is likely that Congress thought of uniformity of substantive law as a subsidiary goal conducive to furthering that purpose. See Currie, Federalism and the Admiralty: "The Devil's Own Mess," 1960 S. Ct. Rev. 158, 163 ("[A] uniform law was apparently one reason for the establishment of the admiralty jurisdiction in 1789" (footnote omitted)). But we are unwilling to rule out that the first Congress saw a value in federal admiralty courts beyond fostering uniformity of substantive law, stemming, say, from a concern with local bias similar to the presupposition for diversity jurisdiction. See The Federalist No. 80, p. 538 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (A. Hamil-
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