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Opinion of the Court
of Kole's injuries (for which every legal system would provide tort compensation) to the mental distress of some stranger who reads about Kole's death in the paper (for which no legal system would provide tort compensation). It cannot seriously be maintained that Article 17 uses the term in this broadest sense, thus exploding tort liability beyond what any legal system in the world allows, to the farthest reaches of what could be denominated "harm." We therefore reject petitioners' initial proposal that we simply look to English dictionary definitions of "damage" and apply that term's "plain meaning." Brief for Petitioners 7-9.
There are only two thinkable alternatives to that. First, what petitioners ultimately suggest: that "dommage" means what French law, in 1929, recognized as legally cognizable harm, which petitioners assert included not only "dommage matériel" (pecuniary harm of various sorts) but also "dommage moral" (nonpecuniary harm of various sorts, including loss of society). In support of that approach, petitioners point out that in a prior case involving Article 17 we were guided by French legal usage: Air France v. Saks, 470 U. S. 392 (1985) (interpreting the term "accident"). See also Eastern Airlines, Inc. v. Floyd, 499 U. S. 530 (1991) (interpreting the Article 17 term "lésion corporelle"). What is at issue here, however, is not simply whether we will be guided by French legal usage vel non. Because, as earlier discussed, the dictionary meaning of the term "dommage" embraces harms that no legal system would compensate, it must be acknowledged that the term is to be understood in its distinctively legal sense—that is, to mean only legally cognizable harm. The nicer question, and the critical one here, is whether the word "dommage" establishes as the content of the concept "legally cognizable harm" what French law accepted as such in 1929. No case of ours provides precedent for the adoption of French law in such detail. In Floyd, we looked to French law to determine whether "lésion corporelle" indeed meant (as it had been translated)
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