Opinion ID: 2539627
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: black lung and prejudgment interest issues

Text: In its reply brief, Travelers argues that if the holding of the Court of Appeals is reversed, we must then decide whether the trial court correctly ruled that Blackstone Mining did not owe premiums relating to black lung benefits and whether pre-judgment interest should have been assessed. Travelers raised the black lung and pre-judgment interest issues in its direct appeal to the Court of Appeals. However, because the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court on the summary judgment issue, it did not address the arguments. Until recently, [i]t [wa]s the rule in this jurisdiction that issues raised on appeal but not decided will be treated as settled against the appellant in that court upon subsequent appeals unless the issue is preserved by cross-motion for discretionary review. Commonwealth, Transportation Cabinet Department of Highways v. Taub, 766 S.W.2d 49, 51-52 (Ky.1988). However, we recently held that to the extent that Taub requires a prevailing party to file a cross-motion for discretionary review on issues raised but not addressed by the Court of Appeals, it is overruled. Fischer v. Fischer, 348 S.W.3d 582, 597 (Ky.2011). This holding stemmed from the idea that Taub was based on the untenable fiction that issues raised but not decided at the Court of Appeals are treated as though decided against the winning party, which would require a cross-motion for discretionary review to this Court to maintain those issues upon the grant of discretionary review. Id. at 592. Of Course, this case differs somewhat from Fischer, since Travelers is not asking that the Court of Appeals' decision be affirmed for other reasons. The black lung and pre-judgment interest issues were wholly independent ones that the Court of Appeals declined to address because it could not get to them after reversing the trial court's summary judgment. Nevertheless, Taub, or what remains of it, cannot serve as a bar to having those issues heard. While the idea that some unaddressed issues are treated as decided against a party still exists in our law, the concept is limited only to instances where the party that can raise the issue lost at the lower court. As pointed out in Fischer, the usual rule is that an appellate court's failure to address the issue is treated as an implicit decision against the position raised by the losing party. The theory underlying this approach is that if the appellate court had considered the issue to be meritorious, the court would have reached a different result .... Id. at 593. This applies where the party seeks to raise multiple, co-equal issues that would independently control the outcome of the case. If the unaddressed claim would have required a certain outcome, then a decision reaching a different outcome necessarily rejects, albeit implicitly, the proposed claim. The failure to then raise those issues in a motion for discretionary review leaves the lower court's implicit decision intact, and that decision become a type of law of the case and binds the parties. This remaining presumption does not apply, however, because Travelers won at the Court of Appeals in this case. Moreover, none of the undecided issues would have required a different outcome, which means they cannot be treated as implicitly decided against either party. Nevertheless, because the prejudgment interest and black lung issues have not been the subject of a cross-motion for discretionary review, and are not independent grounds for affirming the result of the Court of Appeals, the best approach is to remand to the Court of Appeals to address those issues, rather than deciding their merits here. We do not have the benefit of full briefing of those issues, as they were raised for the first time in a reply brief. On remand, the parties can fully flesh out the remaining issues, and the Court of Appeals will be able to give them a full hearing.