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Abstract: Statutory law of the 50 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands is examined regarding money damages recoverable under wrongful death actions. Categories of loss claims, limitations on recoverable damages, and the characteristics of award determination are recorded in a manner that mimics as closely as possible two previous published surveys with regard to the elements of wrongful death statutory law in 1995 and 2005, respectively. Unlike the previous two surveys, the present study relies exclusively on primary sources, namely the jurisdictional statutes themselves. The categorized results are presented by jurisdiction in a comprehensive tabular format. The text highlights certain prominent changes in statutory law arising during the decade ending mid-2015.
I. Introduction
The statutes of the 50 states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (henceforth, the jurisdictions) vary substantially in regard to damages recoverable in wrongful death actions under statutory law. Two previous research efforts have categorized the differing aspects, one concerning the 1995 statutes (Schap and Valvo 1997) and the other concerning the 2005 statutes (Carney and Schap 2008). The earlier of the two articles lays out a framework of classification suitable to permit summary presentation of its results in a tabular framework that lists the various characteristics of importance by state. The latter article updates the earlier results and by suitable coding presents in a single table both the extant characteristics of statutory law a decade removed from the original article and the changes that had occurred over the intervening decade.
Neither Schap and Valvo (1997) nor Carney and Schap (2008) relied on primary sources (i.e., the statutes themselves), but instead made use of statutory summaries from Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest (1995 and 2005, respectively; henceforth Digest). Like the earlier articles, the present study moves toward a tabular summary presentation of its results; unlike the earlier articles, however, the present study uses as its source material the existing statutes. The earlier articles looked to the secondary-source summaries for key words or phrases that would trigger a tabled entry, whereas the present study applies a similar key word/phrase search, but applied directly to the statutory language itself. In the present study an entry is triggered when the key word/phrase is found in the relevant...