Cite as: 516 U. S. 217 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
"bodily injury"—not to determine the subsequent question (equivalent to the question at issue here) whether "bodily injury" encompassed psychic injury. See id., at 536-540. And in Saks, once we had determined that in French legal terminology the word "accident" referred to an unforeseen event, we did not further inquire whether French courts would consider the event at issue in the case unforeseen; we made that judgment for ourselves. See 470 U. S., at 405-407.
It is particularly implausible that "the shared expectations of the contracting parties," id., at 399, were that their mere use of the French language would effect adoption of the precise rule applied in France as to what constitutes legally cognizable harm. Those involved in the negotiation and adoption of the Convention could not have been ignorant of the fact that the law on this point varies widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and even from statute to statute within a single jurisdiction. Just as we found it "unlikely" in Floyd that Convention signatories would have understood the general term "lésion corporelle" to confer a cause of action available under French law but unrecognized in many other nations, see 499 U. S., at 540, so also in the present case we find it unlikely that they would have understood Article 17's use of the general term "dommage" to require compensation for elements of harm recognized in France but unrecognized elsewhere, or to forbid compensation for elements of harm unrecognized in France but recognized elsewhere. Many signatory nations, including Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, and Sweden, did not, even many years after the Warsaw Convention, recognize a cause of action for nonpecuniary harm resulting from wrongful death. See 11 International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law: Torts, ch. 9, pp. 15-18 (A. Tunc ed. 1972); Floyd, supra, at 544-545, n. 10.
The other alternative, and the only one we think realistic, is to believe that "dommage" means (as it does in French
223
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007