Court Opinion

ID: 9451649
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:21:21.963618+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:50.266397
License: Public Domain

WATERMAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring) :
I concur in affirming the order below.
I do so because, despite the fact that the rights of a United States national injured within the territory of a sister nation would seem to require the application of a uniform federal international law, we, as of now, are bound here not by federal precedents striving to reach a uniformly national result, but by the choice-of-law law of the State of New York as that law has been pronounced by its court of last resort. Inasmuch as appellant bought his ticket in Brazil as a farepaying passenger upon a Brazilian airline to a destination in Brazil and was injured in Brazil as the airplane approached that destination, the sharply divided New York Court of Appeals apparently would hold that the Brazilian limitation upon the maximum amount recoverable in Brazil would be accepted in New York as determinative of appellant’s maximum recovery against that airline in New York. See opinion for the four-judge majority of the seven-judge court in Dym v. Gordon, 16 N.Y.2d 120, 262 N.Y.S.2d 463, and the dissenting opinions for themselves and Judge Bergan by Fuld, J., at 129, 262 N.Y.S.2d at 470, and Desmond, C. J., at 134, 262 N.Y.S.2d at 474.
Pursuant to the mandates laid down in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 1188 (1938) and Klaxon Co. v. Stentor E. Mfg. Co., 313 U.S. 487, 61 S.Ct. 1020, 85 L.Ed. 1477 (1941), we cannot here do more than accept the result reached below on the authority of Dym v. Gordon, and in this fast-moving area of the law that is all we should do now. It might well be that the problems that continually arise these days in this area could suggest a new look at Klaxon.