Comment by Thomas Pollard Diaz
The legal development of maritime wrongful death from the Supreme Court's initial pronouncement in The HARRISBURG until its recent decision in Offshore Logistics, Inc. v. Tallentire has, to alter Justice Cardozo's sage commentary, overtaken death itself as the ‘composer of strife by the general law of the sea.’ Over the past 100 years, legislative and jurisprudential contributions (or the lack thereof) to this ‘volatile field’ have produced a body of law governing death caused by wrongful acts that is, in part, disloyal to admiralty law's underlying concepts of uniformity and humanity. However, only in recent years has the interaction between the general maritime law, the Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA), and state wrongful death and survival statutes applicable to deaths on navigable waters halted, if not reversed, ‘the judicial trend toward uniformity and liberal recovery’ ignited by Moragne v. State Marine Lines, Inc. In the last decade, the Supreme Court's decisions in Mobil Oil Corp. v. Higginbotham and Offshore Logistics, Inc. v. Tallentire, coupled with congressional silence, have created a new trend in maritime wrongful death, establishing, in effect, a line of demarcation in recovery three nautical miles off the Coastal United States.
About the Author
Thomas Pollard Diaz.
Citation
62 Tul. L. Rev. 597 (1988)