By Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog, Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog.

Not often, but at least a few times a year, our law firm gets a wrongful death case in Maryland where, regardless of the facts, there is no claim. In this case, the victim, who may be loved by family and friends, has no wrongful death claim because the victim has no spouse, children, or living parents.

Noneconomic and economic measures in Maryland do not provide money damages for loss of life of the victim on their own behalf. The lack of joy that comes with being alive and missing out on a life goes uncompensated. So if you have no spouse, dependents, or children and are negligently killed by another person and you die instantly, there is no recourse in Maryland law for a wrongful death claim or any other meaningful claim outside of your funeral expenses.

Accordingly, a doctor can see that a patient has no primary or secondary wrongful death beneficiaries and know that there is no possibility of a wrongful death medical malpractice claim.

Do I think this happens where doctors feel free to take a risk with a patient because the patient's death by definition could not bring about a wrongful death claim? No, I really don't. But the whole idea that you could recklessly kill someone with no consequences of any kind is a bad thing.

The answer? Change the law to have an entirely new damage claim in Maryland for loss of the enjoyment of life for the victim? Whatever you may think of the idea, there is absolutely no inertia to change the current state of the law.

So what could we do that is more practical to solve the problem? I think the answer is simple. Allow siblings, grandchildren and other clearly defined relatives into a third contingency tier of wrongful death beneficiaries. It would open up only a few new claims but we could all know that there will be accountability when someone is killed by someone else negligence. I think that this would be justice.

Originally posted at Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog. Please visit http://www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com/.

By Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog, Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog.

I stumbled on an interesting Chicago Law Review article today by Eric Posner (Judge Richard Posner's son) and Cass Sunstein (now with the Obama administration). I like Sunstein's views on a number of issues, including animal rights.

The subject article is how the legal system assigns money damages to the loss of human life in wrongful death cases with an eye towards creating greater uniformity. The authors approach this question like it was a mathematical equation to be solved. For grief, the authors conclude that $500,000 is a good starting place, suggesting this formula as the paradigm to determine compensation in wrongful death cases:

To derive a willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid grief from a spouse's death, one would need to (1) determine the average length of time that the grief persists (for example, until remarriage); (2) find an equivalent happiness difference in an area of life that has been reliably monetized (for example, willingness to pay to avoid disease or depression); (3) convert this difference into annual units; and (4) multiply (1) by (3).

I understand the goal of uniformity and I even understand the formula. The problem is homogenizing the equation for everyone. Values vary because juries vary but also because facts vary wildly from case to case. Moreover, the formula is artificially low because it uses how much you will spend to avoid a loss to determine how you value the loss. For example, if you are willing to pay $5 to avoid a 1/100,000 risk of death to your spouse, than the loss of your spouse is worth $500,000.

Originally posted at Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog. Please visit http://www.marylandinjurylawyerblog.com/.