Neville Motts’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
2 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently November 2020
2 district · 3 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Executive Jet Aviation, Inc. v. City of Cleveland · Foremost Insurance v. Richardson · Offshore Logistics, Inc. v. Tallentire · Mobil Oil Corporation v. Higginbotham K · Pain v. United Technologies Corp.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“DOHSA provides, in pertinent part, that "[w]henever the death of a person shall be caused by wrongful act, neglect, or default occurring on the high seas . . . the personal representative of the decedent may maintain a suit for damages in the district courts of the United States." 46 U.S.C.App. § 761. At first glance, the plain text of this statutory provision seems to indicate that DOHSA is implicated only when the wrongful act precipitating death occurs on the high seas. See Lacey v. L.W. Wiggins Airways, Inc., 95 F.Supp. 916, 918 (D.Mass.1951) ("It appears that the phrase `occurring on the high seas' . . . is adjectival of `wrongful act, neglect, or default', rather than of `death'. . . . The statute is taken to mean, therefore, that the wrongful act, neglect or default which caused the death must have occurred on the high seas if a right of action is to exist."). As subsequent courts have interpreted DOHSA, however, the statute's application is not limited to negligent acts that actually occur on the high seas. The Supreme Court has repeatedly noted that when the death itself occurs on the high seas, DOHSA applies. See Offshore Logistics, Inc. v. Tallentire, 477 U.S. 207, 218 , 106 S.Ct. 2485 , 91 L.Ed.2d 174 (1986).”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Because DOHSA does not permit the award of non-pecuniary damages, ... and preempts all wrongful death actions under state law where it applies, see [ Dooley ,] Appellee can recover punitive and other non-pecuniary damages only if DOHSA is inapplicable.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[A]s ... several Fifth Circuit decisions have made clear, DOHSA also confers jurisdiction if the decedent is on the high seas at the time he suffers his mortal injury.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.