Cite as: 532 U. S. 811 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
preserves all claims against third parties, §§ 933(a), (i). And petitioner is a third party: It neither employed respondent's son nor owned the vessel on which he was killed.
Petitioner argues, however, that § 933's preservation-of-other-claims provisions express Congress's intent to reserve all other wrongful-death actions to the States. That argument cannot withstand our precedent, since we have consistently interpreted § 933 to preserve federal maritime claims as well as state claims, see, e. g., Seas Shipping Co. v. Sieracki, 328 U. S. 85, 100-102 (1946); Cooper Stevedoring Co. v. Fritz Kopke, Inc., 417 U. S. 106, 113 (1974), including maritime negligence claims, see, e. g., Pope & Talbot, Inc. v. Hawn, 346 U. S., at 411-413 (upholding recovery for negligence under maritime law by longshoreman covered by the LHWCA). Petitioner's further contention—that the policy implicit in the 1972 amendments to the LHWCA bars a maritime action for wrongful death though the text of those amendments (which left § 933 unchanged) permits it—cannot succeed. We do not find, as petitioner does, an anti-maritime-wrongful-death policy implicit in the amendment to § 905(b), see 86 Stat. 1263, which eliminated covered workers' unseaworthiness claims against a vessel, see, e. g., Bloomer v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 445 U. S. 74, 83 (1980) ("Congress abolished the unseaworthiness remedy for longshoremen, recognized in Seas Shipping Co. v. Sieracki, 328 U. S. 85 (1946)"). That amendment was directed not at wrongful death in particular, but at unseaworthiness generally, see Edmonds v. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, 443 U. S. 256, 262 (1979) ("Congress acted in 1972, among other things, to eliminate the shipowner's liability to the longshoreman for unseaworthiness . . .—in other words, to overrule Sieracki"). To the extent the amendment to § 905(b) reflects any policy relevant here, it is in expressly ratifying longshore and harbor workers' claims against the vessel for negligence, see id., at 259-260. The LHWCA therefore does not preclude this negligence action for wrongful death.
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