http://www.marketplace.org/shows/2002/09/11_mpp.html
Value of a Life - Part Two
There
are, of course, alternatives to the fund, and those alternatives include the
wrongful death lawsuit. We talk with law professor and historian Tom Russell
about the history of the wrongful death lawsuit in the American legal system.
And, Marketplace contributor Adam Davidson talks about his experiences with
insurance adjusters, and how much his life would be worth in a settlement.
Then, economists try their hand at coming up with precise calculations for the
value of a life, but with a different purpose in mind. James Hammitt, professor of Economics and Decision Sciences at
the Harvard School of Public Health, discusses how an economist might come up
with a dollar value. David Salvo, who lost his father in the Sept. 11th attack
on the
AUDIO:
MP: Legal historian Thomas Russell says that the tradition
that guides this valuation is not even as old as the U.S. Constitution.
TR: In the early 19th century, if you were injured and
that led to you death, then the law provided you with no compensation. Law's
answer was, 'How about nothing.'
MP: Because the dead can't sue?
TR: In the early 19th century, yes, that was true. When
you died, any lawsuit that you had died with you.
MP: And how did that start to evolve?
TR: One thing that you can see is that that provides a real benefit to the
people who do the injuring. It becomes cheaper when the people who are injured
actually die. Later in the 19th century and in the early 20th century, the
legal rules begin to change. The first shift in the late in the 19th and early
20th century was something called survival statutes. A survival statute allowed
a lawsuit to continue even after the plaintiff had died. The second type of
statute were wrongful death statutes - these allowed widows, widowers and
children to file lawsuits for the loss of a close family member. Initially
wrongful death statutes provided for recovery of pecuniary losses. And that was
wages very narrowly conceived. Think about the pay envelope that the worker
got, he might make it his habit to spend some money on hobbies, sports or say
at the saloon or the racetrack. The actual amount of money that the worker
brought into the household would be something that the household could try to
recover.
MP: It's real take home pay.
TR: Exactly. With time, law starts to value other services that a decedent provided to the household - mowing the lawn, painting the house - those sorts of things, which economists could value, begin to become the subject for compensation. The final step comes later in the 20th century when, in wrongful death cases, law begins to value the lost relationship that the family has suffered when someone has died