Opinion ID: 1215225
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Heading: oregon cases dealing with interspousal immunity from tort

Text: As noted, the question of the existence of interspousal immunity as a part of the common law of Oregon came relatively late to this court. When it came, in 1955, it came in tandem with a case involving an intentional tort committed by one spouse against another. The two cases gave this court an opportunity to announce both the existence of the rule of interspousal immunity for tort and the limitations on the scope of that rule. The negligence case was Smith v. Smith, supra . Like the present case, it involved an automobile accident. The wife alleged that the accident and her resulting injuries were caused by the gross negligence of her husband. This court, after the brief aside already quoted concerning interspousal immunity for tort at common law, then stated that it had the power to change the common law: If then, this action can be maintained, it must be because the common-law rule has been appropriately changed by statute, or should be changed by the court in the exercise of the power to modify ancient rules of common law by reason of changed social conditions, resulting in a recognizable modification of the public policy of the state. Smith v. Smith, supra, 205 Or. at 288, 287 P.2d 572. Having outlined the scope of the inquiry that it felt required to undertake, the court turned first to an examination of whether the legislature had authorized negligence actions between spouses. It recognized that Article I, section 10, of the Oregon Constitution, assured that every person shall have remedy by due course of law for injury done him in his person, property, or reputation, and that the constitution separately provided, in Article XV, section 5, that [t]he property and pecuniary rights of every married woman, at the time of marriage or afterwards, acquired by gift, devise, or inheritance shall not be subject to the debts, or contracts of the husband[,] but the court found no basis for concluding that the common-law rule as the court perceived it had been changed by the constitution. Id. at 290-91, 295-96, 287 P.2d 572. The court next turned to an extensive examination of the statutory provisions that might be argued to alter or abolish the doctrine. Once again, however, it could find no change. Id. at 291-95, 296-300, 287 P.2d 572. Having exhausted the constitutional and statutory possibilities, the court turned its attention to existing case law from around the country in order to determine whether changed conditions justified changing the doctrine. The court began this portion of its opinion by considering each of the cases relied upon by the plaintiff, distinguishing many (but not all) on the grounds that they either involved an intentional tort, or were decided as a matter of statutory construction, or both. Id. at 299-306, 287 P.2d 572. Finding nothing compelling in the cases relied upon by the plaintiff, the court finally offered its own analysis as to the factors that dictated hewing to the common-law line: Influenced by the weighty dissent in Thompson v. Thompson, [218 U.S. 611, 31 S.Ct. 111, 54 L.Ed. 1180 (1910), a United States Supreme Court case declaring the common law doctrine to be the law of the District of Columbia],    some courts have been greatly impressed and have espoused the admittedly minority view. Clothed in the language of modernity they have heaped criticism upon the ancient theory that husband and wife are one and have shown no little emotion in the process. They find no disruption of domestic tranquillity when a wife sues her husband for tort. They see no distinction between the criminal prosecution of a husband and the right of the wife to sue him for tort, nor do they see any difference between a wife's right to sue for divorce because of cruelty and her right to sue for damages on account of the same. Id. at 305-6, 287 P.2d 572. Having heaped a measure of scorn on modernity, the court acknowledged one of modernity's principal spokespersons, Professor Prosser, and quoted his chief criticisms of adherence to the common-law rule: `The chief reason relied upon by all these courts, however, is that personal tort actions between husband and wife would disrupt and destroy the peace and harmony of the home, which is against the policy of the law. This is on the bald theory that after a husband has beaten his wife, there is a state of peace and harmony left to be disturbed; and that if she is sufficiently injured or angry to sue him for it, she will be soothed and deterred from reprisals by denying her the legal remedy  and this even though she has left him or divorced him for that very ground, and though the same courts refuse to find any disruption of domestic tranquillity if she sues him for a tort to her property, or brings a criminal prosecution against him. If this reasoning appeals to the reader, let him by all means adopt it.' Id. at 306, 287 P.2d 572 ( quoting Prosser, Law of Torts 903-4, § 99 (1941)). The Prosser statement had its intemperate elements, and the court made it clear that the statement had been selected for that reason: It would seem that a suit for divorce is brought for the approved purpose of ending the marital status which has already been destroyed. Not so a suit for negligence. One would suggest that in criminal prosecutions the plaintiff is the state, not the complaining witness   . The argument to the effect that when a husband has beaten his wife, the peace and harmony of the home has already been destroyed, is a valid one, but it applies with force only to intentional wrongs. We are sure that the learned jurist would not say that the peace and domestic tranquillity of the home is ended every time that a wife is shaken up by the inattentive conduct of her husband in operating the family automobile, or vice versa. Nor can it be said that domestic felicity has been forever lost if a husband slips on a carelessly oiled kitchen floor. Id. at 307, 287 P.2d 572. The court thus rejected, in a somewhat convoluted way, the argument that permitting such negligence actions would not disrupt domestic harmony because that harmony had been destroyed already. Its analysis consisted primarily of a simple statement of doubt  it was not persuaded. The court then went on to discuss two reasons it felt justified in adhering to the common-law rule, i.e., avoidance of collusive legal actions and the difficulties inherent in making available between spouses whose lives are so intimately intermingled tort actions whose parameters have grown up in a context of legal actions between parties not so intimately connected. The court saw a substantial danger that permitting interspousal negligence actions would lead to actions that were a fraud on insurance companies: Much effort has been expended in attacking the classical theory that protection of the peace and harmony of the home constitutes the basis for nonliability. It would seem that the effect of suit upon marital felicity must depend upon the facts of the particular case. Action by a wife against her husband may conceivably engender great bitterness where it is based on an intentional wrong, or where there is serious and bitter disagreement as to the facts. It is not unusual that the credibility of witnesses is questioned in damage cases. If the action is not truly an adversary one, then the damage to peace and harmony becomes pure fiction. The minority rulings brush aside the risk of collusion by the husband and wife by the simple assertion that the courts know how to deal with collusive suits. But it is obvious that the risk of collusive action increases when the parties plaintiff and defendant are in confidential relationship. The risk of financial loss is ordinarily inducement enough to encourage a sturdy defense. Remove from a defendant the risk of loss and substitute the covert hope of profit and a situation arises which should give us pause.    We revere the jury system as the bulwark of individual liberty, but we are also realists, and we know that juries are, as a Kentucky mountaineer once said  `tolerable generous with other people's money', especially when the aroma of insurance permeates the courtroom. It would seem that if husband and wife want protection by insurance, accident policies are available. We do see a substantial risk of miscarriage of justice when, in the peace and harmony of connubial bliss, a wife prepares a damage suit against her husband over the solitary protest of an insurance company. Id. at 310-11, 287 P.2d 572. Finally, the court argued that negligence actions simply are not suited to the special and intimate relationship between spouses: One other consideration moves us to leave this issue to the wisdom of the legislature. At least so far as acts of negligence are concerned, courts and writers alike recognize that there are areas of marital intimacy within which actions for negligence should not be allowed, even under the minority rule. Those areas are not, and we think, cannot, be accurately defined.    It has also been suggested that the right of action in a wife should be qualified by applying the doctrine of assumption of risk in various cases arising within the purview of the marital relation. To adopt such a hazy criterion    would, in our opinion, open the doors to litigation but withhold the assurance of victory in many cases. We are not disposed to carve out the area within which actions for negligence should be allowed, or that other area in which the intimacy of the family relationship forbids recovery by the spouses.    Finding no clear-cut issue of public policy, and no line of demarcation to which we can hew, we must leave the right of husband or wife to sue the other for negligent tort to the tender mercies of the legislature. Id. at 312, 314, 287 P.2d 572. We have examined the court's reasoning in Smith at such length in order to identify fully all the rationales the court found to lead, separately or together  the court did not say which  to its conclusion that the common-law rule should be judicially recognized in Oregon. From this examination, we glean the following rationales: (1) No right of action for negligence has been granted between spouses by the Oregon Constitution or legislative enactment; (2) allowance of such actions would be contrary to the policy of the law to foster tranquility in the marital relationship; (3) allowance of such actions would lead to collusive actions designed to defraud insurance carriers; (4) allowance of such actions would lead to a great number of cases being brought, far too many of which would involve circumstances so trivial that they should not permit recovery although they technically do involve negligent torts. To these we think there may fairly be added a fifth rationale, never specifically advanced by the court but implicit in its entire examination of the issue: the legislature, which over the years has vastly overhauled the legal relationship of spouses in a number of different ways, has sufficiently occupied this field of the law so that it is appropriate to leave to that body any further adjustments, including adjustments in the capacity of spouses to sue each other. On the same day that it announced Smith, the court also made clear that the common-law incapacity of spouses to sue each other in tort extended only to negligent torts; intentional torts between spouses were actionable. The case announcing this principle was Apitz v. Dames, supra . In Apitz v. Dames, supra , the executor of a deceased wife brought an action against the estate of the deceased husband for wrongful death. Husband had intentionally shot and killed his wife and then killed himself. The trial court dismissed the case on the ground of interspousal immunity from tort. The Supreme Court reversed. The court's opinion (also by the author of the Smith decision) is not a model of clarity. In fairness, this may well be due to the fact that Apitz was decided the same day as Smith so that policy discussions relating to the issues in each case kept impinging on the analysis in the other case. Certainly, there are passages in each opinion which could have resided satisfactorily  perhaps even more comfortably  in the other. There is also the oddity that, while Apitz refers to Smith on at least five occasions, Smith never once mentions Apitz. Those points noted, we examine Apitz. The court had two questions to dispose of in Apitz. First, it had to determine whether the fact that one or both of the parties to the alleged tort was dead made a difference, i.e., whether the death of either spouse, without more, created a situation to which the common-law rule did not apply. Second, assuming the death of either or both spouses was not relevant, it had to decide whether the rationale for interspousal immunity for negligent torts extended also to intentional torts. The court concluded that the death of either or both parties was irrelevant. While it was true that the case was one for wrongful death under the Death Act, OCLA § 8-903, now ORS 30.020, that statute provided that wrongful death actions could be brought only if the plaintiff's decedent could have brought the same action had she lived: We think that the Oregon Death Statute means exactly what it says and that the remedy thereby given is available only if the `former' (the deceased wife) might have maintained an action, had she lived, against the `latter' (the guilty husband) for an injury done by the same act. Apitz v. Dames, supra, 205 Or. at 252, 287 P.2d 585. The court then went on, by way of dictum, to discuss at some length a question that might more usefully have been addressed in Smith: [Another] court [has] argued that the [interspousal] disability `does not inhere in the tort itself', but the question is whether there is any tort when husband assaults wife. To be sure, there is a crime, but the question remains whether the disability [at common law] was merely procedural or whether under the ancient common-law rule there was no substantive right, i.e., whether there was any `tort'. In a careful review of the early common-law rule, the Supreme Court of Mississippi said: `   The wife's disability to sue the husband was not alone for the lack of a remedy. That was merely incidental. It was for the lack of any cause of action. Therefore, in order to remove any disability of coverture affecting her right to sue, it was necessary to confer a right of action on her. Giving her a remedy to sue was not sufficient.   ' Austin v. Austin, 136 Miss. 61, 100 So. 591, 33 ALR 1388 [1924]. To the same effect see the well-considered case of Wilson v. Brown, Tex. Civ.App. 154 S.W. 322, where it was directly held that there could be no recovery under the death statute unless the deceased could have maintained an action had he not died. The following cases indicate that the early common-law rule did not merely disable the wife to sue her husband for tort. It went further and held that actions which between strangers would be tortious, were not torts when committed by husband against wife. That is to say  disability was not procedural only. The wife at ancient common law had no cause of action on which to sue. Harvey v. Harvey, 239 Mich. 142, 214 N.W. 305 [1927]; Wright v. Davis, 132 W. Va. 722, 53 S.E.2d 335 [1949]; Thompson v. Thompson, 218 U.S. 611 [31 S.Ct. 111, 54 L.Ed. 1180 (1910)]; Libby v. Berry, 74 Me. 286; Drake v. Drake, 145 Minn. 388, 177 N.W. 624 [1920]; Kennedy v. Camp, 14 N.J. 390, 102 A.2d 595 [1954]; Conley v. Conley, 92 Mont. 425, 15 P.2d 922 [1932]; McCurdy, Torts Between Persons in Domestic Relations, 43 Harv L Rev 1030, 1044. Id. at 252-53, 287 P.2d 585. Having stated the foregoing, which would make it appear that the court was going to agree with and adopt the view that the common-law disability was substantive, not procedural, the court's discussion then turned in a different direction and never returned to this one. We are left with the impression that the court believed that the common-law disability was substantive  a discussion, as we have noted earlier, far more important to the outcome of Smith v. Smith, supra , where it was not discussed at all, than to Apitz. Concluding that the Death Act permitted the action then before it only if the wife could have maintained the action had she lived, id. at 254-55, 287 P.2d 585, the court turned to the issue that also concerns us  could the wife have sued the husband for intentionally shooting her if the result had not been fatal? As to this question, the court found the better reasoned authorities to allow such actions. The court began by reviewing decisions from other jurisdictions holding that the infliction of an intentional tort on one spouse by the other spouse was actionable. [3] Perhaps the most vivid material the court cited came from Crowell v. Crowell, 180 N.C. 516, 105 S.E. 206 (1920), a case in which a wife sued her husband for assault and battery by infecting her with a venereal disease: Whether a man has laid open his wife's head with a bludgeon, put out her eye, broken her arm, or poisoned her body, he is no longer exempt from liability to her on the ground that he vowed at the altar to `love, cherish and protect' her. Civilization and justice have progressed thus far with us, and never again will `the sun go back ten degrees on the dial of Ahaz.' Isaiah, 38:8. Crowell v. Crowell, supra, 180 N.C. at 524, 105 S.E. 206, cited in Apitz v. Dames, supra, 205 Or. at 259, 287 P.2d 585. Having reviewed the authorities, the court summarized the situation facing it: It is undoubtedly true    that there is a two-fold basis for the common-law rule of immunity; first, the technical effect of the unity of husband and wife; and second, ancient concepts of public policy inherited from the feudal era whereby it was held that actions between husband and wife must not be permitted because they would destroy the domestic peace and felicity of the home. When it is recognized that the ancient concept of the legal unity of husband and wife has eroded beyond recognition, and when the facts are such that there remains no peace and felicity to be protected, we are impelled to inquire whether it may not be within the function of a common-law court to hold that[,] the basis for the rule of immunity having been removed, the rule itself must fall. Id. at 262-63, 287 P.2d 585. Turning from the case law to the treatises and other writings, the court, somewhat surprisingly, found support and solace in the following now-familiar statement from Dean Prosser: `The chief reason relied upon by all these courts, however, is that personal tort actions between husband and wife would disrupt and destroy the peace and harmony of the home, which is against the policy of the law. This is on the bald theory that after a husband has beaten his wife, there is a state of peace and harmony left to be disturbed; and that if she is sufficiently injured or angry to sue him for it, she will be soothed and deterred from reprisals by denying her the legal remedy  and this even though she has left him or divorced him for that very ground, and though the same courts refuse to find any disruption of domestic tranquillity if she sues him for a tort to her property, or brings a criminal prosecution against him.   ' Id. at 264, 287 P.2d 585 (quoting Prosser, Law of Torts 903-04, § 99 (1941)). We call the use of this material from Prosser surprising because the same material, with the addition of only one more sentence, was quoted with disapproval in Smith v. Smith, supra, 205 Or. at 306, 287 P.2d 572 (discussed ante, at 258). The court went on to consider various other writings and found them generally accommodating of the idea of making intentional interspousal torts actionable. Finally, the court turned to an examination of Oregon precedents, particularly the case of Cowgill, Adm'r v. Boock, Adm'r, 189 Or. 282, 218 P.2d 445 (1950), which held that a minor child could sue his father for an intentional tort. Finding that the precedents, such as they were, supported a rule of liability, the court held: We hold that when a husband inflicts intentional harm upon the person of his wife, the peace and harmony of the home has [ sic ] been so damaged that there is no danger that it will be further impaired by the maintenance of an action for damages and she may therefore maintain an action. Apitz v. Dames, supra, 205 Or. at 271, 287 P.2d 585. Thus, after Apitz and Smith, the state of the common law in Oregon was that a husband or wife was responsible to the other for intentional, but not negligent, torts. The only other case prior to the present one in which this court spoke to the issue of interspousal tort immunity was Chaffin v. Chaffin, supra . There, a wife sought damages for injuries to herself and as administratrix of a deceased child and guardian ad litem of a second child as the result of an automobile accident. The complaint alleged negligence and gross negligence but did not allege an intentional tort. The Supreme Court held that plaintiff did not state a cause of action in either capacity. The court specifically was invited to overrule Smith v. Smith, supra , but declined to do so. Chaffin v. Chaffin, supra, 239 Or. at 390, 397 P.2d 771. The court offered no new or different analysis, preferring to rest its position on what it described as the excellent and exhaustive opinion in Smith. Justice O'Connell, joined in part by Justice Sloan, dissented, arguing that the doctrine of interspousal immunity for negligent torts should be abolished. Neither justice, however, offered an extensive explanation of his reasons. And there the matter has rested in Oregon until today. [4]