192
Opinion of the Court
Appeals apportioned liability two-thirds to National Gypsum and one-third to the City. 915 F. 2d, at 1160.
Thereafter the parties entered into a partial settlement fixing respondents' damages, excluding prejudgment interest, at $1,677,541.86.3 The parties agreed that any claim for interest would be submitted to the District Court for decision. A partial judgment for the stipulated amount was entered and satisfied.
Respondents then sought an award of over $5.3 million in prejudgment interest.4 The District Court denied respondents' request. It noted that "an award of prejudgment interest calculated from the date of the loss is the rule rather than the exception in cases brought under a district court's admiralty jurisdiction," App. to Pet. for Cert. 21a, but held that special circumstances justified a departure from that rule in this case. The court explained:
"In the instant case the record shows that from the outset there has been a genuine dispute over [respondents'] good faith claim that the City of Milwaukee was negligent for failing to warn the agents of [National
3 In arriving at this sum, the parties agreed that respondents' damages were slightly more than $5.4 million, while the City's damages were just over $192,000. The parties multiplied respondents' damages by one-third, resulting in a subtotal of $1,805,829.98 for which the City was responsible. From this subtotal, the parties subtracted two-thirds of the City's damages, or $128,288.12, as an offset because that was the amount of National Gypsum's responsibility. The difference was the City's obligation to respondents. App. 40-45.
4 This figure was based on respondents' assertion that prejudgment interest should be compounded continuously, from the time of the sinking of the Ford, at the commercial prime rate of interest averaged over the period of assessment. Plaintiff's Brief on Issue of Prejudgment Interest in No. 80-C-1001 (ED Wis.), pp. 24-26. The District Court did not express any view on the correctness of this analysis, nor do we. We merely note in passing that the discrepancy between the damages award and the interest sought by National Gypsum is in some measure attributable to the delays that have plagued this litigation—a factor that does not appear to be traceable to the fault of any party.
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