Cite as: 515 U. S. 347 (1995)
Stevens, J., concurring in judgment
LHWCA, Congress in 1927 responded to Jensen and its progeny by extending federal protection to shore-based workers injured while temporarily on navigable waters. The statute excluded Jones Act seamen, on the one hand, and shore-based workers while they were on the landward side of the Jensen line, on the other. As we have explained on more than one occasion, then, the LHWCA was originally a "gap-filling" measure intended to create coverage for those workers for whom, after Jensen, States could not provide compensation. See, e. g., Norton v. Warner Co., 321 U. S. 565, 570 (1944); Davis v. Department of Labor and Industries of Wash., 317 U. S. 249, 252-253 (1942); see also S. Rep. No. 973, 69th Cong., 1st Sess., 16 (1926).10
Thus, the majority's concern about employees "walking in and out of coverage" evokes images of a real problem engendered by Jensen—the problem of employees changing their legal status, sometimes many times a day, merely by walking from one place to another in the course of their employment. That problem is not implicated in this case. At the time of his injury Latsis was employed, with the full knowledge of his employer, on a ship at sea. He could not walk out of coverage until the voyage was over. At the end of the voyage, if Latsis had taken on other duties, wholly or partly on land, and had been injured while so engaged, then the major-10 Whereas the LHWCA as enacted in 1927 responded to the problem of employees who walked out of state coverage every time they boarded a ship, the 1972 amendment to that Act responded to the opposite concern— longshoremen who walked out of federal coverage every time they left the ship. Because state compensation schemes were sometimes less generous than the LHWCA, Congress expanded the federal coverage to encompass injuries occurring on piers and adjacent land used for loading and unloading ships. See H. R. Rep. No. 92-1441, pp. 10-11 (1972). Because the class of workers protected by the LHWCA continued to be composed entirely of shore-based workers, the 1972 amendment appropriately preserved the exclusion of Jones Act seamen. It did not alter the original 1927 Act's constructive definition of "seaman" as "master or member of a crew of any vessel."
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