Opinion ID: 1439615
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: statism. the issue is adjudication for a political philosophy

Text: The encircling issue is statism  the imperial majesty of the central authority within which responsibility for its actions through agents of that crown are not to answer for damage and injury to its citizens. [6] The further concern is my distaste for any constitutional construction now advanced in result by the majority which only protects sanctity of property, but not body or life. These conflicts are as old as the societies and not accurately confined within dogmas that the king can do no wrong. It encompasses a fundamental political conflict between those directed towards the ephemeral power of government and the eternal right of property as contrasted with more modernized ideas of rights of the individual to life and liberty as a territorial imperative for ego and self to be defended against a two-pronged invasion by property priority and the all-dominating government. Pragmatically confined paradigms in cost-benefit criteria to deny safety and inflict loss on the injured hardly fit into constitutional responsibility of government for access to justice and equal protection for redress from injury. Governmental and sovereign immunity become manipulated symbols to justify predictable results desired by preconceived economic and societalistic persuasions. The wail to protect the state from jury over-compensation to the injured reached its crescendo atop the legislative and judicial failure to correct the admitted inequities in the failure of justice. In recent times, this court has been called to enforce the state constitution in significant regard four times and has not previously flinched. It is unfortunate that this majority does so now when the legislature says the state is not responsible when government agents negligently or carelessly cause injury or death. [7] The judicial notion of governmental and sovereign immunities is found in Russell v. Men of Devon, 2 Term Rep. 671, 100 Eng. Rep. 359 (1788). The current apologists who continue to argue for governmental and sovereign immunities despite the openly admitted injustices should perhaps note that Men of Devon was overruled in England in 1890. Jaffe, Suits Against Governments and Officers: Sovereign Immunity, 77 Harv.L.Rev. 1 (1963); Reeves, Leviathan Bound  Sovereign Immunity in a Modern World, 43 Va.L.Rev. 529 (1957). Sovereign immunity as a declaration of the authority of the state differs from governmental immunity as given to local units of government in both justification and composition. Likewise, historical differentiations are found between governmental and proprietary functions and somewhat offset are the distinguishable discretionary and ministerial activities and the more logical and realistic comparisons and separations of the planning activity from the maintenance and preservation governmental function. Recognition is also required of the difference between sovereign immunity as immunity for the state, while liability of state employees cannot be accorded an identical insulation or absolution constitutionally. University of Louisville v. O'Bannon, 770 S.W.2d 215 (Ky. 1989). The court in O'Bannon justified a reinstated sovereign immunity to the university, but held that the extension to the medical facility would involve unconstitutionally impermissible absolution of existing common law rights of action for personal injury. Kaisner v. Kolb, 543 So.2d 732 (Fla. 1989) and Comment, The Role of the Courts in Abolishing Governmental Immunity, 1964 Duke L.J. 888 (1964). The importance derived from the broad application of Chapter 89 comes in part from the fact that Wyoming has never before had a comparably broad scope of immunity within the Wyoming justice delivery tort system. This is not only a new but a great day for injustice. No less than reapportionment, this denial of citizen's rights is singularly regrettable.