"Suppose that A and B, joint tenants, are killed while riding in a car struck by a train. When witnesses arrive, there are no signs of life in A; B is decapitated and blood is gushing from her neck in spurts. Does B survive A?"
My first answer to this macabre question was, I think, the common sense answer. "Did you really have to specify the spurting and the gushing? Ewwwww. I am not in medicine because I prefer to avoid spurting and gushing bodily fluids. Of course she's dead, and you can't say she survived A. She lost her head! Not alive, no way. Gone to Alphabet-Family heaven. Pushing up daises. Kicked the bucket. Gone."
But I am indeed entering a glorious profession. No, this isn't just an example out of the ghoulish minds of law school textbook writers. This is from a real case, Gray v. Sawyer, decided in 1952.
I looked up the case. Yes, my friends, lawyers and doctors debated whether B lived longer, and they decided that B, due to aforementioned spurting and gushing, lived a "fleeting moment" longer than her husband A. She did not have her head for that moment, sure, but who are we to be picky about the meaning of life? Her heart was beating, and the expert testimony doctors testified that she therefore lived longer than her dead husband.
I love law school. You can't make this stuff up.
3 comments:
Good Lord! Why quibble over something like that?
Perfect Halloweenish type entry, though, T.
It's about money! If A and B are joint tenants with right of survivorship in a property, if A and B die at the same time A's heirs get 50% and B's heirs get 50%. But if B survives A, B gets all of A's interest in the property. When B dies, B's heirs get all of it and A's heirs get none. So in this case, it matters quite a bit whether B lived longer, because if B did live longer, A's heirs would not inherit any of the property in the joint tenancy.
That's my hopefully correct understanding
Technically, it seems that there is no such thing as "dying at the same time." The phrase has practical meaning though, and that meaning is that one person is able to act while the other is not. This was never the case for A and B, so I disagree with the holding (finding? whatever).
Survivorship makes sense because joint tenants share in their control of assets. When they can no longer share that control because both are missing, survivorship is irrelevant, but when the reason is that only one is missing, it makes sense. The accident that killed them both resulted in both missing. If the decapitated had any chance to exercise control over their property before dying, then survivorship would come into play.
Anyway, I'm wrong, I know, because I wasn't there to defend A's heirs' rights to the property. Also, my understanding is that it isn't a lawyer's place to make sense of the world, but rather to win for the client without violating the rules of the jurisdiction. I might have to learn how to suppress my interest in justice to become a good lawyer. I'm reading your blog because I was looking for insights on going from a software engineer to a lawyer.
And I'll be happily surprised if I get any reply.
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