## Facts

- W. D. Carroll, an Alabama citizen, was employed as a brakeman by Alabama Great Southern Railroad Company under an employment contract made in Alabama.
- Carroll worked on freight trains operating from Birmingham, Alabama, to Meridian, Mississippi.
- While the train was in Mississippi, a coupling link between two cars broke, causing Carroll’s injury.
- The link came to the railroad attached to a “foreign” railcar and was later used in the train that departed Birmingham toward Mississippi.
- Evidence supported that the link was defective when the train left Birmingham; it had been bent while cold, weakening the iron and creating a crack where it later broke.
- Railroad employees at various points along the route, and train crew members, had duties to inspect couplings and links.
- Carroll alleged negligent inspection and failure to discover or remedy the defect by fellow employees in Alabama.
- Carroll sued in Alabama, relying on Alabama’s employers’ liability statute (Code § 2590), which modified the common-law fellow-servant rule by imposing liability for certain co-employee negligence.
- Mississippi law retained the common-law fellow-servant rule, under which the employer was not liable for injuries caused by a fellow servant’s negligence.

## Issues

1. Whether an Alabama court may award damages under Alabama’s employers’ liability statute for a personal injury suffered in Mississippi.
2. Whether the governing law is Alabama’s (place of alleged negligent omission and employment contract) or Mississippi’s (place where the injury occurred and liability, if any, was completed).
3. Whether Alabama’s statutory employer liability should be treated as an implied contractual term that follows the parties across state lines.

## Decision

- The Alabama Supreme Court reversed the plaintiff’s judgment and remanded.
- The court held there can be no recovery in Alabama for a personal injury sustained in another state unless the injury is actionable under that state’s law.
- The court applied Mississippi law because the tort was completed where the injury occurred.
- Alabama’s employers’ liability statute had no extraterritorial operation and could not create liability for an injury occurring in Mississippi.
- The court rejected the argument that the statute created a contractual obligation arising from the Alabama employment contract.

## Legal Principles

- For tort liability, the governing substantive law is the law of the place where the injury occurs (lex loci delicti), because the wrong is not complete until the injury happens.
- A forum will not provide a remedy for an out-of-state personal injury if the law of the place of injury does not recognize a cause of action on the alleged facts.
- A state statute altering common-law tort duties generally operates only within the enacting state’s territory absent clear extraterritorial authorization.
- Statutory employer liability based on the master–servant relationship is treated as an incident of that status, not as an implied term of the employment contract portable to other jurisdictions.

## Conclusion

Because the injury occurred in Mississippi and Mississippi law did not allow recovery against the employer for fellow-servant negligence, Alabama could not apply its employers’ liability statute to create a cause of action for the out-of-state injury; the judgment for the employee was reversed and the case remanded.


Alabama Great S. R.R. Co. v. Carroll, 97 Ala. 126, 11 So. 803 (Ala. 1892)