Cite as: 516 U. S. 199 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
wrongful-death statutes. See, e. g., The Hamilton, 207 U. S. 398 (1907); The City of Norwalk, 55 F. 98 (SDNY 1893).4 We reaffirmed this practice in Western Fuel Co. v. Garcia, 257 U. S. 233 (1921), by holding that California's wrongful-death statute governed a suit brought by the widow of a maritime worker killed in that State's territorial waters. Though we had generally refused to give effect to state laws regarded as inconsonant with the substance of federal maritime law, we concluded that extending state wrongful-death statutes to fatal accidents in territorial waters was compatible with substantive maritime policies: "The subject is maritime and local in character and the specified modification of or supplement to the rule applied in admiralty courts . . . will not work material prejudice to the characteristic features of the general maritime law, nor interfere with the proper harmony and uniformity of that law in its international and interstate relations." Id., at 242.5 On similar reasoning, we also held that state survival statutes may be applied in cases arising out of accidents in territorial waters. See Just v. Chambers, 312 U. S. 383, 391-392 (1941).
State wrongful-death statutes proved an adequate supplement to federal maritime law, until a series of this Court's
4 Congress also mitigated the impact of The Harrisburg by enacting two statutes affording recovery for wrongful death. In 1920, Congress passed the Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA), 46 U. S. C. App. § 761 et seq. (1988 ed.), which provides a federal claim for wrongful death occurring more than three nautical miles from the shore of any State or Territory. In that same year, Congress also passed the Jones Act, 46 U. S. C. App. § 688 (1988 ed.), which provides a wrongful-death claim to the survivors of seamen killed in the course of their employment, whether on the high seas or in territorial waters.
5 Indeed, years before The Harrisburg, this Court rendered a pathmarking decision, Steamboat Co. v. Chase, 16 Wall. 522 (1873). In Steamboat, the Court upheld, under the "saving-to-suitors" proviso of the Judiciary Act of 1789 (surviving currently in 28 U. S. C. § 1333(1)), a state court's application of the State's wrongful-death statute to a fatality caused by a collision in territorial waters between defendants' steamboat and a sailboat in which plaintiff's decedent was passing.
207
Page: Index Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007