Can an Alabama brakeman recover under Alabama's Employer's Liability Act, or at common law, from an Alabama railroad employer for an injury sustained in Mississippi, where the negligent failure to inspect a defective link occurred in Alabama but Mississippi law treats the negligent inspectors as fellow-servants and imposes no liability?

W. D. Carroll, an Alabama citizen, was employed under a contract made in Alabama as a brakeman on freight trains of the Alabama Great Southern Railroad Company, an Alabama corporation, running between Birmingham, Alabama, and Meridian, Mississippi. A link coupling two cars in a freight train broke while the train was proceeding to Meridian, and Carroll was injured at a point in Mississippi. The link had come to the defendant's road at Chattanooga, Tennessee, coupled to a foreign car, and had been used to couple that car to the defendant's car at Birmingham. The evidence tended to show the link was defective because it had been bent while cold, which cracked it, and that the defect was patent. Defendant employees stationed along the line in Alabama, and the train crew en route, were charged with inspecting links and removing defective ones, and they apparently failed to do so negligently. The defendant had been careful in selecting inspectors, had enough of them, and had supplied good links for replacing defective ones. Mississippi law, as shown by testimony of Judge Arnold and by Mississippi Supreme Court decisions, treated negligent inspectors as fellow-servants for whose negligence the master was not liable.

Carroll sued the railroad in an Alabama trial court for damages for his injury. The case went to the jury on evidence of the facts and of Mississippi law, and the trial court refused the defendant's request for a general affirmative charge directing a verdict in its favor. Judgment was entered for Carroll. The defendant appealed to the Supreme Court of Alabama, assigning numerous errors, chiefly the refusal of that charge.

(McClellan, J.)

No. The plaintiff has no cause of action, so the general affirmative charge for the defendant should have been given and the judgment is reversed and the cause remanded.

At common law, the negligence shown was that of fellow-servants, the inspectors and train crew, not of the master. The defendant selected competent inspectors, employed enough of them, and supplied good links, so the master was not negligent. Alabama law holds the master not liable to one servant for the negligence of a fellow-servant in failing to inspect and repair appliances (Smoot v. Mobile & Montgomery R. R. Co., 67 Ala. 13; Mobile & Ohio R. R. Co. v. Thomas, 42 Ala. 672). The evidence shows Mississippi follows the same rule, and in some respects goes further. Thus no common-law claim exists in either state.

Section 2590 of the Alabama Code, the Employer's Liability Act, does not reach an injury received in Mississippi. A recovery for a personal injury sustained in another state requires that the injury be actionable under the law of the place where it was received. The fact that the negligence occurred in Alabama does not change that. No injury, and so no cause of action, arose until the injury occurred in Mississippi, and the existence of a cause of action is determined by the law of the place where the injury was inflicted. The Mississippi court reached the same conclusion in Chicago, St. Louis & New Orleans R. R. Co. v. Doyle, 60 Miss. 977, and a Tennessee court reached it in Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Ry. Co. v. Foster, 10 Lea 352. The analogy to criminal law also points toward the place where the result is manifested. The statute is interpreted as if limited to injuries received in Alabama.

The contract of employment was made in Alabama, but that does not carry the statute into Mississippi. The duties and liabilities under Section 2590 do not arise from the contract. The contract merely establishes the master-servant relation, and the statute attaches liabilities to that relation within Alabama. Treating the statute as part of the contract would imply that pre-existing common-law rules were also frozen into existing contracts, leading to absurd results, as the application of such statutes to pre-existing contracts shows. Each sovereign determines which acts within its borders are actionable. The relation is governed by the law of the place where the act or omission occurs, as in Whitford v. Panama R. R. Co., 23 N.Y. 465, and Gray v. Jackson & Co., 51 N.H. 9. Mississippi law, which gives no recovery, controls.