A dead child is worth less to a jury than a dead breadwinner.

Evidence

Estimating the value of a case is somewhat like fortune-telling. One can never predict what a jury might do, but verdicts in other personal injury cases provide some guidance. In the calculus of personal injury lawsuits, a dead plaintiff is rarely worth as much as a living but severely maimed plaintiff. Severe injuries, like those suffered by Carney, usually mean a lifetime as a cripple, often with great pain, big medical bills, and loss of income, items a jury can consider in rendering its award. By this same cold calculus, a dead child is always worth less than a dead adult, especially if that adult had been the family breadwinner or mother to several children. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1144

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The system prices human loss by economic productivity, so a child’s death is legally cheaper than an adult’s — a quiet indictment of how law converts grief into arithmetic.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on how wrongful-death law writes a dollar value onto a life, and why the ‘cold calculus’ favors the maimed over the dead and the earner over the child.
• SHARE: Perfect for the one friend who litigates or follows tort reform and would relish the grim actuarial logic of plaintiff valuation.
• XREF: connects to: Settling with one defendant can be worth less than the case it removes — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 1687

Broader Connections

• Settling with one defendant can be worth less than the case it removes #complicates (0.85) — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1687