Judge Frank Easterbrook, writing for the panel, ruled in favor of the broader approach. He pointed to statutory language that defined “transportation” as “services related to that movement, including arranging for, receipt, delivery, elevation, transfer in transit, refrigeration, icing, ventilation, storage, handling, packing, unpacking, and interchange of passengers and property.” That covers a great deal more, he noted, than the act of physically moving property across interstate lines.
Nothing else in the U.S. Code or the Department of Transportation’s regulations “tells us to ask about anyone’s intent, about whether a truck was carrying freight at the moment of impact, or about the ‘totality’ of anything (let alone what would be in the list of circumstances that must be totally contemplated),” Easterbrook wrote. “All we need to know is whether the collision occurred during an interstate journey to deliver freight or one of the steps mentioned in [the statutory text]. The answer to that question is ‘yes.’” As a result, he concluded, Prime Insurance was back on the hook for the $400,000 judgment.
Prime Insurance does not want to pay that $400,000 judgment, however, and so it asked the Supreme Court to intervene over the summer. It argued that the Seventh Circuit had missed the forest for the trees when reading the relevant statutes. “A liability is not ‘for the transportation of property’ between ‘a place in a State’ and ‘a place in another State’ if the liability arises from an empty truck on an intrastate trip,” the company told the justices in its petition for review. “Rather, a vehicle must be carrying property on an interstate trip at the relevant time for the statute to apply.”
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