## Facts

- A head-on automobile collision occurred in Missouri between a car driven by Joseph Purcell, a California domiciliary, and a car driven by Mrs. Reich, then an Ohio resident traveling with her children.
- Mrs. Reich and one child were killed; the other child, Jeffry Reich, was injured.
- Plaintiffs (Lee Reich, individually and as administrator, and Jeffry Reich) were heirs of the decedents; the estates were administered in Ohio.
- After the accident, plaintiffs moved to California and became permanent residents.
- The parties stipulated to damages for certain claims and agreed that damages for Mrs. Reich’s wrongful death would be either $55,000 or $25,000 depending on whether Missouri’s wrongful-death cap applied.
- Missouri law limited wrongful-death recovery to $25,000; Ohio and California imposed no such limit.

## Issues

1. In a California wrongful-death action arising from a Missouri accident, whether the court must apply Missouri’s statutory cap on wrongful-death damages under the law of the place of the wrong.
2. Whether, under a choice-of-law analysis, Ohio or California law should govern the measure of wrongful-death damages instead of Missouri law.

## Decision

- The California Supreme Court reversed the judgment applying Missouri’s $25,000 cap.
- The court held that Missouri’s damages limitation should not govern this case and that Ohio law applied to the measure of wrongful-death damages.
- The court rejected automatic application of lex loci delicti for tort cases and required an issue-specific choice-of-law analysis based on the interests of the involved states.
- Prior California decisions mandating application of the law of the place of the wrong were disapproved to the extent they required that result.

## Legal Principles

- Choice of law in multistate tort cases is determined by identifying the state whose policy interests would be most impaired if its law were not applied to the particular issue.
- The place of the accident is not automatically controlling for all tort issues; different issues (such as damages limits) may call for different governing law.
- A damages cap reflects a loss-allocation policy that may have weak application when neither party is domiciled in the state that enacted the limitation.
- A state of the plaintiffs’ domicile at the time of injury has a strong interest in full compensation for its residents when its law permits full recovery.
- A forum state does not acquire a compensatory interest solely because plaintiffs move there after the injury, and where the forum’s law is not protective of its domiciliary defendant, it may have little independent interest in applying its own law.

## Conclusion

The court held that Missouri’s wrongful-death damages cap did not apply because Missouri lacked a substantial interest in limiting recovery for nonresident parties, while Ohio had a strong interest in full compensation for its domiciliaries; the decision established California’s modern, issue-specific interest-analysis approach in tort choice-of-law disputes.


Reich v. Purcell, 67 Cal. 2d 551, 432 P.2d 727 (Cal. 1967)