Assessment of Posttraumatic Bodily Injury in Road Accidents – Legal and Medico – Legal Criteria

Abstract

. Bodily injuries caused in road accidents can affect the life of the victims for a certain period of time or permanently. In relation to this damage, the legal doctrine includes the existence of bodily damage that reveals the impact of the traumatic event in the life of the victim, damage whose assessment involves an interdisciplinary approach. Aspects such as functional deficit (temporary or permanent), pain felt by the victim, aesthetic damage or sexual damage, which represent subcategories of bodily damage, must be evaluated scientifically with the support of legal medicine. In the practice of the courts, the evaluation of bodily harm is done in most cases according to the criteria of the criminal code regarding bodily harm and not according to the specific criteria of civil law that refer to the harm. This factual situation is possible due to the lack of a legal nomenclature that contains the classes of physical or mental injuries that are part of bodily injury, but also due to the absence of medico-legal scales specifically adapted for this area of justice. This paper highlights the particularities of bodily injury and the needs from both the legal and medico-legal areas for a correct assessment in order to establish a fair compensation for the victim of the road accident.