Opinion ID: 1165377
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Analogies examined by other courts.

Text: As we have said, two characteristics of the harm for which plaintiff would hold a negligent defendant liable are that it occurs as a consequence of an injury to another person, and that it is psychic or emotional harm divorced from any injury to plaintiff's physical person or tangible property. These characteristics generally, though not invariably, preclude recovery based on negligence. Plaintiff, however, narrows the asserted liability specifically to injury to a minor child's interest in its closest family relationship, that with its parents. Legal arguments for and against the existence of such a tort claim therefore have sought analogues in the treatment of other claims for damages for emotional distress in such family relationships. Typically these include (1) actions for loss of spousal consortium, (2) parents' recovery of damages for negligent injuries to minor children, (3) recognition of the child's noneconomic loss in the wrongful death of a parent, (4) actions for alienation of affections, and (5) bystanders' actions for emotional distress from witnessing the death or injury of a close relative. Courts confronted with a child's claim based on negligent injury to a parent have examined some or all of these analogues with divergent results. Not only do the foregoing actions differ among the states, they may reflect apparent inconsistencies within one state, and each is distinguishable in some respect from the child's claim. The Massachusetts court in Ferriter, the first decision to allow the child's cause of action, drew support from the parent's recovery of damages for emotional injury in actions for abduction or seduction of a child, in which the father's loss of the child's services was recognized to be a fiction. Although such an action was also available if one's child was beaten or wounded, the court conceded that no Massachusetts case had compensated a parent's mental suffering from physical injury to the child, so this offered little support for the court's assertion that such a claim by a child had analogous precedent in such compensation for the parents' sentimental as well as economic injuries. 413 N.E.2d at 692-93. Moreover, the Massachusetts court faced its earlier rejection of a child's claim for damages against a defendant who had enticed her mother to desert her and her father, which it described in Ferriter as the disfavored action for alienation of affections and distinguished as posing greater threats of extortionate litigation and of pitting family members against each other. 413 N.E.2d at 694. These may be distinctions of policy, but they do not differentiate the character of the harm inflicted upon the minor child by the negligent as distinct from the intentional tort. Finally, the Ferriter court fell back on the inclusion of damages for loss of the decedent's society in the statutory action for wrongful death, concluding: We think it entirely appropriate to protect the child's reasonable expectation of parental society when the parent suffers negligent injury rather than death. 413 N.E.2d at 695. The Iowa Supreme Court's decision in favor of the claim, as already mentioned, was substantially influenced by its reading of an Iowa statute which provided for the recovery of the value of services and support as spouse or parent, or both by the directly injured person or her estate and further provided that recovery for these elements of damage may not be had by the spouse and children, as such. The court previously had interpreted this statute as permitting recovery for all elements of the child's claim for injury to a mother, though procedurally incorporated in the action by the mother or her administrator. Hankins, supra n. 7. When it reexamined its interpretation in Weitl v. Moes, supra , the court cited Hankins as recognizing a statutory claim for a child's loss of parental consortium. It therefore treated its new decision as merely moving the child's damages from the claim on behalf of the parent into a separate action: [T]he more drastic change in our law would result not from recognition of the claim, but from its denial. 311 N.W.2d at 269. [10] In the Michigan case, Berger v. Weber, supra n. 1, the majority briefly listed the action for loss of spousal consortium, the parents' action for a fictitious loss of an injured child's services, and inclusion of loss of companionship in damages under the wrongful death act as well as under a dramshop act as sufficiently demonstrating the state's policy to recognize a child's cause of action based on a negligent injury to a parent. [11] It discounted the asserted contrary policy of a statute barring suits for alienation of affection, because this bar coexists with actions for negligent injury to one's spouse or child. The court concluded that the real anomaly is to allow a child's recovery for the loss of a parent's society and companionship when the loss attends the parent's death but to deny such recovery when the loss attends the parent's injury. 303 N.W.2d at 426. The Michigan dissenters dismissed the analogy to a parent's action for injury to a child because in such an action damages are limited to loss of services and expenses incurred. 303 N.W.2d at 434, n. 38. Their main attack was on the analogy to the action for loss of consortium, which they described as a historical curiosity that first had been unthinkingly expanded from old intentional torts into negligence and thereafter equalized between the spouses by extending it to the wife rather than by abolishing the husband's action. [12] Apparently the dissenters were not prepared to make a similar attack on the inclusion of damages for lost society and companionship under the wrongful death act; they only warned that this analogy for a claim based on nonfatal injuries would be available to all who are eligible claimants under the wrongful death act, not only to the injured person's children. To turn to the major recent opinion rejecting the child's cause of action, Borer v. American Airlines, supra , the California Supreme Court faced an additional argument for recovery by analogy to that court's decision in Dillon v. Legg, 68 Cal.2d 728, 441 P.2d 912, 69 Cal. Rptr. 72 (1968), which allowed a mother's cause of action for emotional trauma in witnessing the negligently caused death of her child. The holding that such a trauma is compensable by damages is hard to square with the statement in Borer that money cannot compensate for a child's trauma of growing up with a permanently disabled and helpless mother, which may well be longer lasting and harder to forget than the shock of witnessing an injury or even a death. The Borer court, however, explained Dillon as being limited to cases in which the bystander's psychic trauma has somatic consequences. 563 P.2d at 864. This sufficed to deny the analogy to the child's claim in Borer, although only until another child claims that such consequences accompanied its psychic injury from a parent's disabled condition; however, the California court later abandoned the requirement of physical harm in an action for negligent infliction of emotional distress. Molien v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, 27 Cal.3d 916, 167 Cal. Rptr. 831, 616 P.2d 813 (1980). [13] In Borer, the California court also denied any anomaly in allowing recovery for emotional loss in wrongful death actions but not when the injured parent is permanently disabled. It saw the primary purpose of the wrongful death statute not in compensating the survivors for their loss but in preserving the deterrent function of tort law when a fatally injured person's own claim did not survive, thus providing to tortfeasors a substantial incentive to finish off their victims. [14] 563 P.2d at 865. In rejecting the analogy to the spousal action for loss of consortium, the Borer court added to its previously described reasons of social policy the distinction that the spousal action rests in part on impairment of plaintiff's sexual life. 563 P.2d at 863. In sum, the opinions of other courts have ascribed varying significance to the several evident analogies in deciding for or against the child's damage claim for the negligent incapacitation of a parent. The child's negligence action has been labeled as one for loss of consortium, and then allowed as involving a similar family relationship as the spousal action or denied for lacking the sexual element, or because that action is an anachronism which should not be extended. An analogy has been drawn to the parent's action for loss of the child's services, but the analogy is shaky when that action has not previously been allowed for solely emotional injury. Recovery for psychic trauma from witnessing serious injury to a family member is potentially a close parallel, but that action and its prerequisites are unsettled. [15] Denial of an action for intentional alienation of affections has been cited as incompatible with allowing an action for negligent invasion of the same interest, or it has been distinguished as involving a dispute over the voluntary conduct of a family member. Probably the recovery of psychic damages for a parent's wrongful death offers the strongest parallel for a similar recovery for losing a parent by negligent disablement. That action is statutory, and the opinions have not agreed on what underlying policies a state's wrongful death statute enacts. In the light of these divergent analyses, we examine how the opposing contentions fit into the existing law of this state.