FIFTEEN years after the Airblue ED 202 plane crash that killed all 152 people on board, an appellate court in Islamabad has awarded Rs5.4 billion in compensation to the families of eight victims. This is unlikely to be the end of the matter. The case will move through further stages of appeal, and the money may not arrive anytime soon. That part is familiar. What is easier to miss is the quieter truth beneath it, that these families are still carrying a national tragedy through the legal system long after the rest of the country has moved on.
The dead do not file claims. The living do. The living learn dates and numbers they never asked to know. They learn how to speak about the thing that happened to them in the language of tort — accident, negligence, vicarious liability — because institutions require a vocabulary before they offer attention.
For the law to engage at all, grief has to be translated into loss. Grief is not the same as loss. Grief is lived. Loss is legible — set out in documents, files and defined heads of damages. Joan Didion wrote of grief as resistant to sequence or sense. Law insists on both.
A plane crash does not need interpretation but the law requires it to be categorised. The crash has to be placed within the terms of international conventions and liability regimes so that legal responsibility can be argued and assessed. Once grief enters this legal order, it takes on a different form. The grieving family adopts new roles and descriptions: plaintiffs, respondents, applicants, legal heirs, dependants. Lived time does not move in the same register as legal time, which advances in adjournments and orders, while grief remains where it is.
The dead do not file claims. The living do.
There is nothing exceptional about this. From the Pan Am Flight 103 crash in Scotland to Malaysian Airlines MH17 in Ukraine, families affected by aviation disasters in history have described the same afterlife of catastrophe: years spent repeating the same facts, the same narrative, keeping loss institutionally intelligible, even after public urgency has passed.
In the constitutive accounts of law associated with American sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, legality does not operate only at the level of courts and statutes. It is made and remade by the ordinary actions of ordinary people, whose lives are reshaped as they move through legal processes. In other words, when people turn to law, they do not simply use it. They supply it with what it needs to function, and are adjusted by that process in turn.
If, as legal sociologists suggest, it is out of the most ordinary acts that law is produced, then grief does not merely encounter the legal system. It helps sustain it. Each filing, appearance, and statement of loss performs the work through which legality reproduces itself in the aftermath of tragedy. That work is not abstract. Courts rely on earlier accounts of loss to decide what care was owed, how responsibility should be fixed, and what compensation is appropriate. A 1991 US supreme court judgement on damages for mental distress for passengers following a near-crash is still referenced in aviation litigation. A damages claim following the PIA flight PK 668 crash in Multan in 2006 sits behind the Airblue judgements.
These tragic histories are rarely recalled in full. In legal argument, whole catastrophes are reduced to a single name. ‘Lockerbie’ is no longer just a place in Scotland, but shorthand standing in for years of loss. This does more than just preserve loss. Reduced this way, loss
is able to travel — across cases, places, and time — and to set, in advance, the terms on which later loss will have to be presented in order to be institutionally recognised. That is how grieving persons turn to the law already knowing what will be demanded of them and what kinds of suffering can be compared. What was extracted from grief remains in circulation as loss, available for public use, detached from the people who first bore the cost of making their suffering usable.
None of this imputes villainy. Nor is it novel. It’s a structural requirement of a common law system that depends on continuity, precedent, reasoned justification. Legal systems account carefully for outcomes. They are less attentive to what it takes to sustain participation. Loss has to remain available for the law to continue, but the burden of keeping it so leaves little trace in the record. That is why the recent Airblue judgments should land with force, even if they are headed into further rounds of appeal. Not because anything finally settles after all these years, but because the demands placed on the grieving may now, perhaps, begin to recede. Keeping one’s grief permanently available to the system is not a civic function anyone should have to bear.
The writer is a lawyer based in Karachi. The views expressed are her own.
Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2026