The Barbara Cates

DICKINSON, District Judge.

These exceptions raise the question of jurisdiction in admiralty. Whether any complaint is the proper subject of the law maritime, and hence whether it is of admiralty jurisdiction, is a subject, unavoidably or purposely, left murky.

The instant case concerns itself with a collision between a vessel and a construction in navigable waters. The abstract proposition has been well expressed in the phrases that the question turns “upon the locality of the tort, the nature of the structure and its use.” It is thus clear that whether a given ease is the proper subject of…