Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

divided-damages rule

Maritime law. The obsolete principle that when two parties are jointly liable to a third party for a tort, each party is liable for only half the damages. 0 The courts now apply a comparative-negligence standard."For over a hundred years admiralty law embraced the rule of divided damages' in collision cases .... In 1975, in United States v. Reliable Transfer Co., 421 U.S. 397, 95 S.Ct. 1708, 44 L.Ed.2d 251 (1975), the Supreme Court jettisoned that inequitable and illogical rule in favor of proportionate allocation of fault