Court Opinion

ID: 9676972
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:39:44.955087+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:52.694913
License: Public Domain

HAWTHORNE, Justice
(dissenting).
I do not agree that the award to the. widow for loss of maintenance and support should be decreased from $150,000 to $40,000.
As I read the Court of Appeal’s opinion, that court recognized that damages of this *19nature cannot be calculated with certainty, and that appellate courts cannot prescribe any rigid formula for calculating the element of support in damages in cases such as this. That court did not use a formula although the trial judge did. The Court of Appeal simply took into consideration all of the factors present in the instant case, and then concluded that the trial judge had not abused his discretion in making the award. La.App., 123 So.2d 625.
I think the Court of Appeal was entirely correct in considering the life expectancy of the spouses and the annual earnings of the deceased and in reducing to its present worth the sum to which plaintiff was entitled.
The award in this case was reduced by the majority of this court principally on the basis that the deceased’s income was derived primarily from the production of oil in the Lobdell field, and that income from this source would cease within two to six years after his death, when the oil production from that field would be exhausted. To me this is an unsound basis for reducing the award.
There is no question that the deceased was successful in the oil and gas business. His average monthly royalty checks at the time of his death wiere more than $2,000, and he was the owner of a Vis overriding royalty interest in over 37,000 acres of land. He left an estate which was valued for federal estate tax at more than $153,-000.
When the majority reduced the award because the husband’s main source of income, the Lobdell oil field, would soon be exhausted, it must have assumed that he would have remained idle the rest of his natural life and would have received no income from any other source, in spite of the fact that when he died, he had for some time been a successful operator in his chosen line of work.
In making an award in a case such as this the chief element to be taken into consideration is the wife’s loss of financial assistance for maintenance and support occasioned by the husband’s death. To say that the wife under the facts of the instant case has been deprived of only about $1,000 a year over the 30 years of her husband’s working life expectancy seems to me to be unrealistic, but this is exactly what the majority decided when it awarded her only $40,000 for loss of maintenance and support.