Landon v. United States

I dissent solely with respect to the allowance in the plaintiff’s damages of the total amount of his weekly wages during disability as loss of earnings. My reasons follow.

No more than my colleagues do I like the unpopular doctrine of Drinkwater v. Dinsmore, 80 N.Y. 390.1 But the doctrine we, as federal judges, think desirable is here as irrelevant as our private choices of odors or poems; .for the Federal Tort Claims Act requires us, in matters affecting substantially the outcome of the litigation, to apply the New York decisional rule, whatever it may be.

My colleagues have not shown that the…