Legal Dictionary of Pakistan

simultaneous-death act

A statute providing that when two persons die under circumstances making it impossible to determine the order of their deaths (as in a common disaster), each person is presumed to have survived the other for purposes of distributing their respective estates. ( Many states' simultaneous-death acts have been amended to require that a person survive the decedent by at least 120 hours to qualify as an heir or beneficiary. See COMMORIENTES.