Mcdermott, Inc. v. Amclyde and River Don Castings LTD. (511 U.S. 202)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided April 20, 1994 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 511 U.S. 202 · 114 S. Ct. 1461
- Decided
- April 20, 1994
- Term
- October Term 1993
- Vote
- 9–0
- Majority author
- Justice Stevens
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court. A construction accident in the Gulf of Mexico gave rise to this admiralty case. In advance of trial, petitioner, the plaintiff, settled with three of the defendants for $1 million. Respondents, however, did not settle, and the case went to trial. A jury assessed petitioner’s loss at $2.1 million and allocated 32% of the damages to respondent AmClyde and 38% to respondent River Don Castings, Ltd. (River Don). The question presented is whether the liability of the nonsettling defendants should be calculated with reference to the jury’s allocation of proportionate responsibility, or by giving the nonsettling defendants a credit for the dollar amount of the settlement. We hold that the proportionate approach is the correct one. I Petitioner McDermott, Inc., purchased a specially designed, 5,000-ton crane from AmClyde. When petitioner first used the crane in an attempt to move an oil and gas production platform — the “Snapper deck” — from a barge to a structural steel base affixed to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, a prong of the crane’s main hook broke, causing massive damage to the deck and to the crane itself. The malfunction may have been caused by petitioner’s negligent operation of the crane, by AmClyde’s faulty design or construction, by a defect in the hook supplied by River Don, or by one or more of the three companies…
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