Measuring Damages in Survival Actions for Tortious Death

Survival statutes have been adopted to avoid the effect of common law rules preventing claims for the tortious death of a human being. These statutes give the personal representative such causes of action on behalf of the decedent\u27s estate as the decedent would have had were he still alive. The question the statutes do not answer, however, is the effect of the death of a party on the measure of damages. The Washington Supreme Court\u27s decision in Warner v. McCaughan illustrates the problem. Warner arose out of the death of a twenty-one year old college student. Alleging that the death was caused by improper diagnosis and care and by administration of unsafe drugs, her parents, individually, and her father, as administrator of her estate, brought suit for damages against the doctor, hospital, and pharmaceutical company on the grounds of negligence and breach of warranty. The parents\u27 individual claims were dismissed because the parents were not dependents of the decedent, but the estate\u27s claim was entertained. One of the items of damage claimed by the estate was disability in consequence of a medical condition caused by the defendants\u27 tortious acts and resulting in the decedent\u27s death. This claim presented the major issue of the case: whether the prohibition in the general survival statute against recovery for pain and suffering7 prohibited recovery for the decedent\u27s disability. The court rejected the defendants\u27 argument that the statutory prohibition meant that all claims personal to the decedent abated with her death8 and held that the statute allows the broad common-law claim for personal injury, except for pain and suffering. The principal question remaining, which the Warner court did not fully answer, is how these damages for physical injury are to be measured in a tortious death case. The purpose of this article is to discuss the factors relevant to the damages issue and to suggest appropriate standards for measuring them

The intersection graph of the disks with diameters the sides of a convex n-gon

© 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Given a convex polygon of sides, one can draw disks (called side disks) where each disk has a different side of the polygon as diameter and the midpoint of the side as its center. The intersection graph of such disks is the undirected graph with vertices the disks and two disks are adjacent if and only if they have a point in common. We introduce the study of this graph by proving that it is planar for every convex polygon.Postprint (author's final draft