Facts: A New York (NY) resident was killed in a motor accident in Massachusetts (MA) by employees of a NY company. His surviving family brought a claim in tort for compensation to relatives in NY. According to NY law at the time, choice of law in tort was the lex loci delicti (i.e. MA law applied). The difference between NY law and MA’s law was that the amount of damages recoverable under MA’s law was referable to the degree of culpability of D (i.e. imposing exemplary damages, not simply compensatory damages). D argued the law was penal.
Issue: Was a law to impose exemplary damages (over compensatory damages) penal?
Held: The law was not penal in the meaning of private international law. The penalty was being recovered for the benefit of the family members, not the state of Massachusetts.
Cardozo J: “[W]e are not so provincial as to say that every solution of a problem is wrong because we deal with it otherwise at home…The courts are not free to refuse to enforce a foreign right at the pleasure of the judges, to suit the individual notion of expediency or fairness. They do not close their doors, unless help would violate some fundamental principle of justice, some prevalent conception of good morals, some deep-rooted tradition of the common weal.” “We shall not make things better by sending them to another state, where the defendant may not be found, and where suit may be impossible. Nor is there anything to shock our sense of justice in the possibility of a punitive recovery. … We shall not feel the pricks of conscience, if the offender pays the survivors in proportion to the measure of his offense.”