Woodward v. Stewart

Decision Date09 July 1968
Docket NumberNo. 191-A,191-A
Citation243 A.2d 917,104 R.I. 290
PartiesLewis WOODWARD v. John A. STEWART and Catherline Stewart. ppeal.
CourtRhode Island Supreme Court
OPINION

POWERS, Justice.

This is a civil action brought by the plaintiff pursuant to the provisions of G.L.1956, chapter 7 of title 10, as amended, known and cited as the Wrongful Death Act, for the death of Lewis E. Woodward, III, whose death resulted from an automobile accident occurring on Interstate Route 195 in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The plaintiff's decedent was a passenger in an automobile owned by defendant Catherine Stewart and being operated with her consent by defendant John A. Stewart. All the parties above mentioned are Rhode Island residents, and were returning to Barrington, Rhode Island, from a trip which originated in Barrington, Rhode Island, with a stop in Newport, Rhode Island, but which included for the purposes of convenience a short trip through Seekonk, Massachusetts.

The parties had left Barrington for a dinner engagement in Newport, after which they were returning to Barrington. At their intended exit from the interstate highway, and while still in Massachusetts, the car in which they were traveling collided with an automobile owned by Robert H. Halben of Johnston, Rhode Island, and being operated with his consent by Walter L. Douglas, Jr., of North Providence, Rhode Island, as a result of which Lewis E. Woodward, III, suffered injuries and died.

The complaint was brought in the superior court for Providence county on June 30, 1966. The defendants duly filed their answer, and on May 2, 1967, moved that the case be dismissed on the pleadings pursuant to rule 12c of the rules of civil procedure of the superior court. After a hearing, the trial justice granted the motion and plaintiff duly claimed an appeal.

In support thereof, he argues in substance that the trial justice granted defendants' motion on the basis of the strict lex loci delicti theory of conflict of laws but that because of the more recent and changing trends in this field, he should have denied the motion and permitted the case to proceed to trial under the Rhode Island Wrongful Death Act. The trial justice, it is to be noted, was well aware of the changing trends in this field, but was unwilling as a nisi prius court justice to decide that Rhode Island should depart from what had heretofore been established law and follow the recent line of decisions from other jurisdictions. Accordingly, he granted the motion to dismiss, thus facilitating consideration by this court of the policy question presented.

Squarely raised then is the question of whether Rhode Island should abandon its long-standing rule that the law of the place of the tort shall govern the rights of an injured party, 1 and adopt the principle which dissects an action into various elements, and governs each individual element or issue by the law of the jurisdiction which has the most significant contacts relative thereto. 2 This, plaintiff argues, will result in the equitable resolution of all cases and will avoid the harsh results of the strict application of the lex loci delicti doctrine.

The objections to the application of this significant contacts or center of gravity approach to litigation is that the merits of the lex loci delicti doctrine-uniformity, predictability, and certainty of result-will be lost. Both bench and bar, it is urged, will be faced with a case to case, or ad hoc approach wherein different forums will be able to apply the laws of different jurisdictions to different parties for injuries resulting out of the same accident or occurrence. 3

An analysis of the cases relied on by the contending parties here, however, persuades us that the lex loci delicti theory of conflicts of law in tort cases has lost much of the thrust of its original merit through changes in modern business, recreation and transportation.

When the doctrine was first established in the mid-nineteenth century, the situation in this country was such that people rarely crossed state boundaries. Under such circumstances, there was validity in a rule which presumed that persons changing jurisdictions were aware of the duties and obligations they were incurring because of such a change. Even if they were not, requiring them to be subject to the laws in the jurisdiction in which they were injured was viewed as justified because of the vested rights doctrine that was prevalent at the time. 4

The present day situation, however, has changed all that. Millions of American citizens daily cross state boundaries, and many of them cross multiple state boundaries during the course of a single day. The case at bar is a prime example of the relative insignificance which today's citizens place on passing through different jurisdictions. The only reason that the Stewart car was in Massachusetts was that Interstate Route 195 was a convenient route between the two Rhode Island communities. At the time of the accident, deceased, being a passenger, may well not have been aware that he was in Massachusetts.

Increased interstate activity alone, it is argued, does not warrant us in disrupting the doctrine of stare decisis and adopting a new rule when the prior rule has otherwise retained its merit. We might be inclined to agree if that were the situation, but our research indicates the lex loci delicti doctrine has not retained its hallmarks of validity-those of providing uniformity and predictability of results and certain formulae by which individuals could govern their actions in accordance with foreseeable legal consequences.

Very early within the development of that doctrine, it became well recognized by the courts and text writers that a forum in a conflicts situation was free to apply its own procedural rules to rights and liabilities arising under the substantive laws of a foreign jurisdiction. 5 Litigants' rights were not entirely controlled by the law of the place where the tort occurred, and the results and applicable law were not always easily predictable. Courts found that labeling a matter as substantive or procedural, was often a subjective determination to be made by the forum court, and the guidelines used in making such determinations were not very often open to objective classification or criticism. Thus, when a court met a hard case in which it had to decide whether a particular matter was substantive or procedural-and there was a serious question raised as to which label to apply-the courts found that they had considerable latitude to characterize the matter as procedural and govern the case by the law of the forum. 6

Furthermore, if a forum confronted a hard case and there was no rationale upon which the controlling matters could be labeled as procedural, it could always apply the rule that it is not constitutionally obligated to give full faith and credit to a foreign jurisdiction's laws if to do so would violate some 'public policy' of the forum state. 7

The strict lex loci delicti doctrine, as it was being applied by the courts in the first half of the twentieth century, therefore, no longer provided the uniformity of result considered to be its primary virtue. This undermined the justification for its use when the effect was to override a forum's domestic law in cases in which the forum had the principal interest.

Of course a forum court is not constitutionally free to apply its own laws to every element of every tort case brought before it. 8 The full faith and credit, due process, and equal protection clauses of the federal constitution still require that the forum have some rational basis for applying its own laws to a tort or injury which occurred in a foreign jurisdiction and which is being litigated in the forum.

It is these constitutional requirements, and the above-mentioned dissatisfaction with the lex loci delicti doctrine, that have prompted courts to search for new rules to govern conflicts cases in the area of tort law.

The first cases to depart from the lex loci delicti doctrine, without expressing a substantive-procedural distinction or public policy rationale, were decided in the late fifties. 9 These cases all involved the question of whether the interspousal immunity statutes of the locus would govern a suit brought in the domicile forum, and all stand for the proposition that a cause of action may be split into a variety of elements and that there is no reason why all the elements of a case must be resolved by the substantive law of the same state.

Because these cases involved the status of family members to sue one another, a status that has long been recognized to be governable by the law of the domicile for purposes of marriage, divorce, probate, etc., and because the courts in those cases expressly disaffirmed the contention that they were rejecting '* * * the general rule that ordinarily the substantive rights of parties to an action in tort are to be determined in the light of the law of the place of wrong,' 10 they have not been heralded as radical departures from the lex loci delicti rule. The fact remains, however, that these cases do stand for the proposition that a forum may have sufficient interest in the outcome of a particular issue, to apply its own substantive laws in making a determination thereof.

Court after court has adopted some aspect of this interest weighing approach to litigation. 11 True, as defendants argue, the courts have been guarded in their approach to this new theory and have not often openly declared that they were totally abandoning the lex loci deliciti doctrine and applying their own substantive rules and laws extraterritorially. The clear import of the line of cases adopting...

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