Opinion ID: 1924529
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The English Courts' Experiment with Hedonic damages

Text: ¶ 85. Apparently not until 1976, did an American court allow hedonic damages in a wrongful death action applying state law. See Katsetos v. Nolan, 170 Conn. 637, 368 A.2d 172 (1976). However, the English courts had allowed hedonic damages nearly forty years prior to this. In an often cited law journal article, University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Professor Andrew J. McClurg (one of the major proponents of hedonic damages) discusses the English courts' failed experiment and subsequent abolition of hedonic damages: English courts have long awarded damages for what they termed the loss of expectation of life. The first case recognizing such a recovery was Flint v. Lovell, [1 K.B. 354 (1935)] where the trial court awarded 4000 to a seventy-year-old man injured in an auto accident, based upon the judge's conclusion that he had lost the prospect of an enjoyable, vigorous and happy old age which I am satisfied on the medical testimony might have gone on for a number of years if this unhappy accident had not occurred. The evidence showed the accident reduced the plaintiff's life expectancy by eight or nine years. In Rose v. Ford, [App. Cas. 826 (1937)] the House of Lords extended the reasoning of Flint to a wrongful death situation, holding that the right to recover damages for the loss of expectation of life passes upon death to the decedent's personal representative. However, the House of Lords avoided the issue of how such damages should be measured, stating only that how the damages are to be calculated is a question which this House has not to decide, stating only that how the damages are to be calculated is a question which this House has not to decide, for there has been no quarrel with the amount fixed by the Court of Appeal in this case of 1,000. The House of Lords grappled, quite unsatisfactorily, with the valuation issue in Benham v. Gambling [App. Cas. 157 (1941)]. The trial court awarded 1,200 for the loss of expectation of life of a two-and-one-half-year-old child, which the court of appeals affirmed. The House of Lords ruled that 1,200 was an excessive award for a child's lost expectation of life, and reduced the award to 200. Viscount Simon's opinion for the House of Lords recognized that the Lords were faced with the difficult task of indicating what are the main considerations to be borne in mind in assessing damages for loss of the expectation of life. Unfortunately, the opinion did little more than eliminate certain factors from consideration, and in the end offered only an amorphous general principle as a standard. The House of Lords began by opining that the victim's life expectancy, while of some relevance, was not of primary importance in measuring damages: [T]he thing to be valued is not the prospect of length of days, but the prospect of a predominantly happy life.... It would be fallacious to assume, for this purpose, that all human life is continuously an enjoyable thing, so that the shortening of it calls for compensation, to be paid to the deceased's estate, on a quantitative basis. The ups and downs of life, its pains and sorrows as well as its joys and pleasuresall that makes up life's fitful feverhave to be allowed for in the estimate. In assessing damages for shortening of life, therefore, such damages should not be calculated solely, or even mainly, on the basis of the length of life which is lost. Instead, the question resolves itself into that of fixing a reasonable figure to be paid by way of damages for the loss of a measure of prospective happiness. This requires a determination of what the victim's prospects for happiness were prior to death. The claim on behalf of the child victim in Benham failed on this count. Viscount Simon believed that because of her immaturity, there was necessarily so much uncertainty about the child's future that no confident estimate of prospective happiness could be made. Based upon this, the House of Lords agreed that 200 was a proper figure for lost-expectation-of-life damages. In doing so, it emphasized that because a dead person cannot be compensated and because putting a money value on lost life necessitates an effort to equate incommensurables, damages in all such cases should be very moderate. Strangely, after offering this general guidance, the House of Lords acted as if it had instilled great certainty into the damage calculation process, confidently stating it was approving a standard of measurement which, had it been applied in earlier cases, would have led... to reduced awards. After Benham, English courts began awarding nominal, standardized sums for lost expectation of life. Thus, in Gammell v. Wilson, [2 All E.R. 557 (C.A.)(1980)] the court of appeals held that an award of 1,250 was proper for a decedent's lost expectation of life in all cases, to be changed only to take account of inflation. The court reasoned as follows: This figure has to be a conventional figure. It is important that there should be uniformity. Accordingly, when the question of the amount is raised in this court, we must do our best to give guidance. It is not one of those cases where this court can properly say: This is a matter for the trial judge. We will not interfere. The law has since changed in England. In the appeal of Gammell [App. Cas. 27, 74 (1982)], the House of Lords expressed dissatisfaction with damages for the lost expectation of life and called upon Parliament to take action to clarify the amount of damages that should be awarded in wrongful death cases. In the Administration of Justice Act of 1982, [ch. 53 § 1(1)] Parliament responded to this call and abolished damages for lost expectation of life. [7] Andrew J. McClurg, It's a Wonderful Life: The Case for Hedonic Damages in Wrongful Death Cases, 66 Notre Dame L.Rev. 57, 106-09 (1990)(emphasis added & internal footnotes references omitted). In Rose v. Ford, App. Cas. at 859-62, Lord Roche, though agreeing that hedonic damages were appropriate in that case, expressed his concerns over this new element of damages in a wrongful death action: Nevertheless, it is this question of the assessment of damages which gives me more anxiety than any other part of the case ... I am conscious that this discussion leads into paths of abstruse thought and technicalities of law far remote from the practical directions which judges will have to give to themselves and to juries for the purposes of determining questions of amount. . . . I would add that I confess to some apprehension lest this element of damage may now assume a frequency and prominence in litigation far greater than is warranted in fact, and becoming common form may result in the inflation of damages in undeserving cases....