Opinion ID: 1120753
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Heading: Criteria for Certified Questions Under the Statute

Text: ORS 28.200 provides that the decision whether to accept certification is committed to our discretion: The Supreme Court may answer questions of law certified to it   . (Emphasis supplied.) See also 12 ULA 52, Commissioners' Comment to § 1 ([T]he highest court of the state has the right to answer questions certified to it; [answering the questions certified] is not mandatory). Before our discretion is called into play, however, the certified question must meet five criteria created by the statute: (1) The certification must come from a designated court; (2) the question must be one of law; (3) the applicable law must be Oregon law; (4) the question must be one that may be determinative of the cause; and (5) it must appear to the certifying court that there is no controlling precedent in the decisions of this court or the Oregon Court of Appeals. We address each of these criteria in turn.
The first requirement is self-explanatory. The certifying court must be one of those listed in the statute. We note, by way of illustration, that the list does not include United States Magistrates or Referees in Bankruptcy. It follows that any certification from a federal court must be from a court described in Article III of the United States Constitution.
The second requirement, viz., that the question certified be one of law, requires that the question be framed in a way that is susceptible of adjudication by way of a pronouncement as to what the law is. If particular facts are pertinent to resolution of the question, those facts must be discernible from the materials provided by the certifying court. ORS 28.210. [3] Certification, therefore, is not appropriate if disputed facts make questions of law unclear. 17A Wright, Miller & Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 4248 at 174 and n. 52 (1988 & 1990 Supp) (hereafter Wright & Miller).
The third requirement, closely related to the second, is that the legal question propounded concern Oregon law, rather than the law of some other jurisdiction. See Equitable Life Assurance v. McKay, 306 Or. 493, 760 P.2d 871 (1988) (answering a certified question concerning whether, under Oregon law, a particular legal rule from another jurisdiction would be treated as procedural or substantive).
The fourth requirement, viz., that the question must be one whose answer may determine the cause, means that our decision must, in one or more of the forms it could take, have the potential to determine at least one claim in the case. That interpretation accords both with the text of the statute and with the majority rule. See, e.g., Wright & Miller § 4248 at 169-71 and nn. 42, 43; White v. Edgar, 320 A.2d 668, 677 (Maine 1974) (illustrating majority view). [4]
The fifth requirement is that it must appear to the certifying court that there is no controlling precedent from either this court or the Oregon Court of Appeals. Controlling precedent from either court is sufficient. A certifying court is not to distinguish between decisions of this court, on the one hand, and those of the Court of Appeals, on the other, so long as the latter are not called into question by other decisions of this court. Certification is not a vehicle in Oregon for obtaining a Supreme Court decision on a question of law that already has been decided by the Court of Appeals. The first four requirements can be determined objectively by the certifying court prior to certification. The fifth question, on the other hand, is subjective. It directs the certifying court to satisfy itself that it is not certifying questions of law already controlled by existing Oregon appellate precedent. Presumably, no court would certify a question unless it were so satisfied. Thus, as to this fifth criterion, there really is nothing for us to review  the act of certification itself establishes that the certifying court had the requisite state of mind. (We shall later discuss what we would do were we to disagree with the certifying court, but that is a question of how we shall exercise our discretion, not of whether the statutory criteria have been met.) Where one or more of the five statutory criteria is absent, our inquiry will be at an end. We shall deny certification in such cases. Assuming, however, that the five statutory prerequisites to accepting certification are present, the question then becomes: Should this court, in the exercise of its discretion, accept certification? We turn to an examination of the factors that we will consider in making that decision.