Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 5.djvu/620

 608 FEDERAL REPORTBB. �There may be a cause of action growing'out of Buch a disaster as this of which the admiralty court would have no jurisdic- tion, because the wrong might happen to be consummated not on the water but on the land, as in case the fire is com- municated to buildings on the land or results in injuring a person on the land. The Plymouth, ut supra; The Epsilon, 6 Ben. 378. None of the claims of the parties who have appeared in this case, however, are of that character. It has been seriously doubted whether the rule of the coxnmon law, that a cause of action for an injury to the person dies with the person, is also the rule of the maritime law. There is some authority for the proposition that it is not, and that in admiralty a suit for damage in such a case survives. The Sea Gull, 2 L. T. K. 15; Cutting v. Seabury, 1 Spragne, 522; The Guldfaxe, 19 L. T. E. 748; The Epsilon, 6 Ben. 381. But, however it may be in respect to the original jurisdiction pf admiralty courts, I see no valid reason why the right of a person to whom, under the municipal law governing the place of the transaction and the parties to it, the title to the chose in action survives or a new right to sue is given for damages resulting from a tort, the admiralty courts, in the exercise of their jurisdiction in personam over marine torts, should not recognize and enforoe the right so given. It has been held by the supreme court that such legislation by a state as applied to marine torts does not, in the absence of a commer- cial regulation by congress covering the same field, intrench upon the exclusive powers given to the general government. Steam-boat Go. v. Chase, 16 Wall. 522. Such a çtatute, of course, can confer no right as against persons not subject in any way to the jurisdiction of the state whose law confers such right of action. Crapo v. Allen, 1 Sprague, 184. But in general it seems that the courts of admiralty are bound to recognize the rights of property as established by competent state authority, and so far as they have jurisdiction in rem or in personam, as the case may be, in cases of maritime eon- tracts or marine torts, to enforce the rights of parties accord- ing to the title so derived. A familiar illustration of this ����