354
Opinion of the Court
II
The Jones Act provides a cause of action in negligence for "any seaman" injured "in the course of his employment." 46 U. S. C. App. § 688(a). Under general maritime law prevailing prior to the statute's enactment, seamen were entitled to "maintenance and cure" from their employer for injuries incurred "in the service of the ship" and to recover damages from the vessel's owner for "injuries received by seamen in consequence of the unseaworthiness of the ship," but they were "not allowed to recover an indemnity for the negligence of the master, or any member of the crew." The Osceola, 189 U. S. 158, 175 (1903); see also Cortes v. Baltimore Insular Line, Inc., 287 U. S. 367, 370-371 (1932). Congress enacted the Jones Act in 1920 to remove the bar to suit for negligence articulated in The Osceola, thereby completing the trilogy of heightened legal protections (unavailable to other maritime workers) that seamen receive because of their exposure to the "perils of the sea." See G. Gilmore & C. Black, Law of Admiralty § 6-21, pp. 328-329 (2d ed. 1975); Robertson, A New Approach to Determining Seaman Status, 64 Texas L. Rev. 79 (1985) (hereinafter Robertson). Justice Story identified this animating purpose behind the legal regime governing maritime injuries when he observed that seamen "are emphatically the wards of the admiralty" because they "are by the peculiarity of their lives liable to sudden sickness from
fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court," see, e. g., Berkemer v. McCarty, 468 U. S. 420, 443, n. 38 (1984), and our Rule 24.1(a) provides that a merits brief should not "raise additional questions or change the substance of the questions already presented" in the petition. See also Izumi Seimitsu Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha v. U. S. Philips Corp., 510 U. S. 27, 31-32 (1993); Taylor v. Freeland & Kronz, 503 U. S. 638, 645-646 (1992). Because petitioners did not raise the issue in the petition for certiorari, we will not consider any argument they may have under Rule 51 concerning the effect of respondent's failure to object to the seaman status jury instructions in their entirety.
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007