Catherine E. MacDonald v. Air Canada’s Empirical Analysis
439 F.2d 1402 · 1971
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 9 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably DeMarines v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (1978), Day v. Trans World Airlines, Inc. (1975)
13 federal appellate · 9 district · 5 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 Lambdin v. United States · Federal Insurance Company v. Ada Ligia Bonilla Colon, Etc., Pan American World Airways, Inc. v. Ada Ligio Bonilla Colon, Etc.
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he Convention requires that the accident occur in the course of disembarking operations. If these words are given their ordinary meaning, it would seem that the operation of disembarking has terminated by the time the passenger has descended from the plane by the use of whatever mechanical means have been supplied and has reached a safe point inside of the terminal, even though he may remain in the status of a passenger of the carrier while inside the building. Examination of the Convention’s original purposes reinforces this view. The most important purpose of the Warsaw Conference was the protection of air carriers from the crushing consequences of a catastrophic accident, a protection thought necessary for the economic health of the then emerging industry. Partially in return for the imposition of recovery limits, and partially out of recognition of the difficulty of establishing the cause of an air transportation accident, the Conference also placed the burden on the cashier [sic] of disproving negligence when an accident occurred. II Conference International De Droit Prive Aerien, 4-12 Octobre 1929, at 135-36 (1930); Message from the President of the United States Transmitting a Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules, Sen. Exec.Doc. No. G. 73rd Cong., 2d Sess. 3-4 (1934). Neither the economic rationale for liability limits, nor the rationale for the shift in the burden of proof, applies to accidents which are far removed from the operation of aircraft. * With”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““The carrier shall be liable for damage sustained in the event of the death or wounding of a passenger or any other bodily injury suffered by a passenger, if the accident which caused the damage so sustained took place on board the aircraft or in the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“, the first requirement for invocation of the Convention. In any event, however, the court found that the injuries sustained by plaintiff did not occur during the operation of disembarking since that operation had”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.