A Choice-of-Law Fight Across Three Countries — Foreign-Seaman Recovery

A career mechanic, hurt on a painted walkway in the rainy season.

the mechanic is a New Zealand citizen and career offshore Chief Mechanic, by 2014 living in Samoa — where he was born, owned a home, and his family lived — while his work took him to drilling rigs off the coast of Nigeria. On the morning of September 11, 2015, finishing his rounds aboard the rig MONARCH, he started back toward the office and his feet went out from under him on a painted steel walkway. He landed hard on his right side. When he pushed himself up, he felt oil or diesel mixed with the rainwater — the adjacent Halliburton wireline unit had been leaking. The walkway had no non-slip coating, though other "prone to slip" decks on the same rig did. It was the Nigerian wet season; it had been raining.

Two concessions, in the company's own words.

Within hours, the operator's safety personnel completed an incident investigation report — and it did the plaintiff's liability work for him. It identified the absence of anti-slip coating as a finding and the leaking wireline unit as a contributing condition, and listed both fixes as "Improvement Opportunities": enhance the anti-slip surface, install anti-slip walkways, and add an oil drain pan around the wireline unit. The rig's Offshore Installation Manager, asked whether there was ever a good reason not to have anti-slip on a walkway exposed to rain, answered that there was not. The liability picture was strong. The legal picture was the fight.

The Jones Act's foreign-seaman provision.

The defendants moved for summary judgment under 46 U.S.C. § 30105(b), which on its face bars a foreign seaman injured developing foreign mineral resources from bringing a claim under U.S. maritime law. Mr. The mechanic was a foreign citizen, hurt in Nigerian waters, working for offshore drilling operators. On the face of the statute, the case looked over.

It was not over. Subsection (c) is the part the motion skipped.

§ 30105(c) is a switch, not a wall.

Subsection (c) restores the action — under a different body of law — where the seaman has no remedy under the law of the place of injury or his country of citizenship. As the Texas First Court of Appeals put it in Nazareth v. McDermott, § 30105(c) "operates as a choice-of-law provision that determines the type of claim a foreign seaman can assert," and the U.S. court keeps jurisdiction to apply that foreign law. The Fifth Circuit and its district courts had said the same for years — Jackson v. North Bank Towing, Oyuela v. Seacor Marine, Bodden v. Tidewater, Perez v. Gulf Coast Marine. By invoking § 30105, the defendants had not closed the courthouse door; they had selected the law that would govern the trial. Mr. The mechanic gave notice under Rule 44.1 that his claims would proceed under the law of New Zealand.

The 25-day analysis.

New Zealand replaced common-law personal-injury claims with a no-fault accident-compensation scheme — but its extraterritorial cover reaches only a claimant "ordinarily resident in New Zealand," defined by a 183-day presence test in the year before injury. Immigration New Zealand records showed Mr. The mechanic had been in New Zealand for 25 days in that window, and his home was in Samoa. The scheme did not cover him — and, as the New Zealand Court of Appeal has held, where that cover is absent "the right to sue at common law is revived." His common-law negligence claim and the seaworthiness duty codified in the Maritime Transport Act 1994 were all available, supported by a sworn declaration from a New Zealand barrister.

The defense motion, in the end, became the plaintiff's choice-of-law roadmap. The matter resolved on confidential terms. The framework it worked out — § 30105(c) as a switch, the residency analysis, and foreign maritime law applied through Rule 44.1 — is the part worth sharing. See the firm's complex maritime cases for more cross-border work.