Court Opinion

ID: 9418537
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:30:02.680415+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:05.068667
License: Public Domain

Mb. Justice Holmes,
dissenting.
There is no dispute that the language of the Civil Code of Panama, Art. 2341, which has been quoted, is broad enough on its face to give an action for negligently causing the death of the plaintiff’s wife. Taken literally it gives such an action in terms. The article of the Code Napoleon from which it is said to have been copied is construed by the French Courts in accord with its literal meaning. La Bourgogne, 210 U. S. 95, 138, 139. It would seem natural and proper to accept the interpretation given to the article at its source, and by the more authoritative jurists who have had occasion to deal with it, irrespective of whether that local interpretation was before or after its adoption by Spanish States, so long as nothing seriously to the contrary is shown. The only thing that I know of to the contrary is the tradition of the later common law. The common law view of the responsibility of a master for his servant was allowed to help in the interpretation of an ambiguous statute in *216Panama R. R. Co. v. Bosse, 249 U. S. 41, 45, for reasons there stated. But those reasons have far less application here, even if we refer to the common law apart from statute, and in any case are not enough to override the plain meaning of statutory words.
The common law as to master and servant, whatever may be thought of it, embodied a policy that has not disappeared from life. But it seems to me that courts in dealing with statutes sometimes have been too slow to recognize that statutes even when in terms covering only particular eases may imply a policy different from that of the common law, and therefore may exclude a reference to the common law for the purpose of limiting their scope. Johnson v. United States, 163 Fed. 30, 32. Without going into the reasons for the notion that an action (other than an appeal) does not lie for causing the death of a human being, it is enough to say that they have disappeared. The policy that forbade such an action, if it was more profound than the absence of a remedy when a man’s body was hanged and his goods confiscated for the felony, has been shown not to be the policy of present law by statutes of the United States and of most if not all of the States. In such circumstances it seems to me that we should not be astute to deprive the words of the Panama Code of their natural effect.
The decision in the Hubgh Case, 6 La. Ann. 495, stands on nothing better than the classic tradition that the life of a free human being, (it was otherwise with regard to slaves,) did not admit of valuation, which no longer is true sentimentally, as is shown by the statutes, and which economically is false.
I think that the judgment should be affirmed.
The Chief Justice, MR. Justice McKenna and Mr. Justice Brandéis concur in this opinion.