816
Opinion of the Court
solve the issue here: whether requiring such an accommodation by refusing to recognize a federal remedy is preferable as a matter of maritime policy. We think it is not.
The choice-of-law anomaly occasioned by providing a federal remedy for injury but not death is no less strange when the duty breached is negligence than when it is seaworthiness. Of two victims injured at the same instant in the same location by the same negligence, only one would be covered by federal law, provided only that the other died of his injuries. See, e. g., Byrd v. Napoleon Avenue Ferry Co., 125 F. Supp. 573, 578 (ED La. 1954) (in case involving single car accident on ferry, applying state negligence law to claim for deceased husband's wrongful death but federal maritime negligence law to claim for surviving wife's injuries), aff'd, 227 F. 2d 958 (CA5 1955) (per curiam). And cutting off the law's remedy at the death of the injured person is no less "a striking departure from the result dictated by elementary principles in the law of remedies," Moragne v. States Marine Lines, Inc., 398 U. S., at 381, when the duty breached is negligence than when it is seaworthiness. "Where existing law imposes a primary duty, violations of which are compensable if they cause injury, nothing in ordinary notions of justice suggests that a violation should be nonactionable simply because it was serious enough to cause death." Ibid. Finally, the maritime policy favoring recovery for wrongful death that Moragne found implicit in federal statutory law cannot be limited to unseaworthiness, for both of the federal Acts on which Moragne relied permit recovery for negligence, see Jones Act, 46 U. S. C. App. § 688(a); Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA), 46 U. S. C. App. § 761 et seq.; see also Engel v. Davenport, 271 U. S. 33, 36-37 (1926) (Jones Act). In sum, a negligent breach of a maritime duty of care being assumed
Court dismissed her state-law claim on jurisdictional grounds, respondent re-filed it in state court, where it was resolved against her. See Brief for Respondent 2, n. 1.
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