may choose to remain unorganized. A requirement that, for their own good, they must remain in a company-dominated union to avoid any possibility of their aiding the wrongdoers denies them the freedom of choice which the Act preserves. Whatever character the Union may be found to have, the Board's protection to respondent's employees should not be disturbed because of it.

The motion for permission to offer new evidence attacking the credibility of witnesses raises a different question-one going to the quality of evidence on which a conclusion is to be reached. The Board, after full consideration, denied the motion because it found that the proffered evidence even if true had no relation to the issue of Company coercion of its employees. Whether a case shall be reopened after the evidence is closed, is, in courts, ordinarily a matter of discretion. I think the Board's action in this proceeding can not be said to be an unfair exercise of discretion and that in any event it was correct in holding the evidence irrelevant to the limited issues it decided.

It must be remembered that the fundamental issue which the Board decided here is whether the Association is company-dominated. We are told that testimony concerning the misdeeds of the electrical workers are material to this conclusion because the Board relied on witnesses Marks, Freeman, and Guy; because the Board "must have relied" on other union witnesses; because the Board's decision may drive the employees into the offending Union; because an Association official was asked hypothetical questions about bombing; and because company witnesses might have been more credible if the full facts of violence had been known.

To support its view that the Board might have disbelieved certain of its witnesses had the full facts been known, the Court has gone not only to the testimony

which has been printed by the Board and the Company and offered by the Board as the basis of its case, but has searched evidence to which the Board has made no reference in its findings and which it has not offered as of any credibility at all. Evidently the Board is to be required to re-examine that evidence in which it has already, by rejection of it, expressed disbelief. I think no possible good can come from reconsidering evidence once rejected for the purpose of re-rejecting it.

The Board called sixteen Union witnesses. The three most under suspicion for dynamiting were Guy, Marks, and Freeman. Guy's testimony, as submitted by the Board in support of its finding, is that two company supervisors kept a Union meeting under surveillance, a fact conceded by the supervisors. Marks testified that the Company did not interfere with union organization, and Freeman testified that Holmes, president of the Association, was respected by his fellow employees. A more innocuous or colorless collection of evidence can scarcely be imagined. The testimony of six other Union witnesses, as reflected by the printed record, is equally trifling, while that of the other seven, which fills about four per cent of the printed record, was not relied on by the Board in its findings.

The ultimate Board holding before the Circuit Court of Appeals for review is that the Association was companydominated. This holding rests almost exclusively on the testimony of Company witnesses or witnesses affiliated with the Association. There is not even a hint that these witnesses were intimidated or interfered with in any way, or that they told anything but the truth. If it be assumed that Guy, Freeman, and Marks are wholly unworthy of belief, this basic testimony given by Company witnesses would still be unaffected. The suggestion made by the Court, not raised by the Company either in its petition for rehearing to the Board or in its motion for remand in

the Circuit Court of Appeals, that examination into the dynamiting will reflect on the attitude of the employees toward the Union during the earlier organizational period, therefore misses the heart of the case. If the Company's supervisory representatives did organize and dominate the Association, the Association is company-dominated and the Board's order should be upheld, I. A. of M. v. Labor Board, 311 U. S. 72, 79, 80; if they did not, the Board's order should not be enforced. The character of organizers of a separate and distinct union contributes nothing to the issue of Company conduct.

The last suggestion as to the materiality of further investigation into the dynamiting is that for some reason the trial examiner asked Holmes questions concerning his view on violence in labor disputes. Holmes expressed a proper respect for law and order, and it is incredible that a new hearing would either cause him to alter his view in this regard or change the Board's respect for his conclusion.

It will not seem odd that so much of the evidence originally introduced by the Board was eventually deemed irrelevant to the final decision when it is realized that the original charge against the respondent was much broader than the final holding. This evidence, directed to the support of these peripheral charges, lost all consequence for this case when the Board declined to believe the charges themselves. For example, the original complaint alleged that one Elkins was wrongfully discharged. Since both the trial examiner and the Board found the charge unsupported, Elkins' testimony in this respect and all that supports it drops completely from the case. The opinion of the Court appears to require re-assessment of such surplus testimony offered in behalf of charges concluded to be unfounded.

Of course no Court should shelter dynamiters from exposure and inquiry. But compelling the Board to digress

from the adjudication of a labor dispute in which such dynamiting has no part into a pursuit of the guilty, punishes the innocent employees of respondent rather than the evildoers themselves. The Labor Board is no fair substitute for a grand jury or a criminal court.

If the Board had denied respondents an opportunity to offer newly discovered evidence which tended to show that witnesses to material facts relied on by the Board had since the hearing been convicted of serious crimes affecting their credibility, I would not object to sending the matter back to the Board. But analysis of the record demonstrates that no such thing occurred. I think we should send the case back to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the normal review procedure.

O'DONNELL v. GREAT LAKES DREDGE &
DOCK CO.

CERTIORARI TO THE CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT.

No. 320. Argued January 6, 1943.-Decided February 1, 1943. 1. A deckhand in the service of a vessel plying navigable waters in interstate commerce, who was ordered by the master to go ashore and assist in repairing, at its connection with a land pipe, a conduit through which the vessel was unloading cargo, and who while thus engaged was injured by the negligence of a fellow servant, has a right of recovery under the Jones Act, 46 U. S. C. § 688, which gives a right of action to a seaman injured "in the course of his employment." P. 38.

2. The Jones Act as so applied is constitutional, even though the injury was inflicted while the seaman was on shore. P. 43.

3. The constitutional authority of Congress to provide such a remedy for seamen derives from its authority to regulate commerce, and its power to make laws which shall be necessary and proper to carry into execution powers vested by the Constitution in the government or any department of it, including the judicial power

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Opinion of the Court.

which extends "to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction." P. 39.

4. There is nothing in the constitutional grant of admiralty jurisdiction to preclude Congress from modifying or supplementing the rules of the maritime law as experience or changing conditions may require, at least with respect to those matters which traditionally have been within the cognizance of admiralty courts either because they are events occurring on navigable waters, or because they are the subject matter of maritime contracts or relate to maritime services. P. 40.

5. The right of recovery in the Jones Act is given to the seaman as such, and, as in the case of maintenance and cure, the admiralty jurisdiction over the suit depends not on the place where the injury is inflicted but on the nature of the service and its relationship to the operation of the vessel plying in navigable waters. P. 42. 6. Since the subject matter-the seaman's right to compensation for injuries received in the course of his employment-is one traditionally cognizable in admiralty, the Jones Act, by enlarging the remedy, did not go beyond modification of substantive rules of the maritime law well within the scope of the admiralty jurisdiction, whether the vessel, plying navigable waters, be engaged in interstate commerce or not. P. 43.

7. The fact that Congress has provided that suits under the Jones Act may be tried by jury, on the law rather than on the admiralty side of the federal courts, does not require a conclusion different from that here reached. P. 43.

127 F.2d 901, reversed.

CERTIORARI, 317 U. S. 611, to review a judgment denying recovery in an action under the Jones Act.

Mr. Walter F. Dodd for petitioner.

Mr. Ezra L. D'Isa for respondent.

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE STONE delivered the opinion of the Court.

The question for decision is whether a seaman injured on shore while in the service of his vessel is entitled to recover for his injuries in a suit brought against his em