Opinion ID: 849010
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: hadfield v oakland co drain comm 'r

Text: Two years after the Legislature effectively ratified Ross's interpretation of § 13, the Court decided Hadfield, supra. It found that the Legislature had used state in § 7, as it had in § 13, to mean governmental agency. The defendant in Hadfield argued that there were no common-law exceptions to governmental immunity under the statute. 6 Once again, the Court saw a conflict between the language of the statute, legislative intent, and an historic immunity exception. It concluded: While the defendant's arguments, advocating recognition of only statutory exceptions [to governmental immunity], are temptingly simple and straightforward, they negate or ignore the second half of the legislative mandate of § 7. That section requires a continuation of the nuisance exception as formulated prior to the enactment of the governmental immunity act in 1964 . . . . [Id. at 149.] The Court rejected the defendant's argument using this reasoning: The second sentence of § 7 requires that the state's governmental immunity remain as it existed before July 1, 1965. The trespass-nuisance exception is strongly rooted in Michigan's history. Nothing in the expressions of the Legislature indicated an intention to change it. Today's holding discards the conclusion in Hadfield by reinterpreting the second sentence of § 7 as an expansion of sovereign immunity. I strenuously disagree with this newfound purpose for the statute. Both the first sentence and the second sentence of § 7 use the words tort liability. Therefore, the type of liability and immunity the Legislature intended in the first sentence, it also intended in the second. According to the second sentence, the immunity from liability was not to be modified or expanded from what existed under the common law. That reasoning, coupled with the intention to create a uniform system that we found in Ross, leads to one conclusion 7 only: the Legislature meant to keep the state's sovereign immunity where it was before July 1965, preventing its expansion or erosion, and to extend it uniformly to all other governmental entities. The common-law exception of trespass­ nuisance thus would have survived.