Opinion ID: 2584112
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 18

Heading: reply to the court's critique of the dissent

Text: ¶ 35 The court chooses to ignore the undeniable fact that its post- Tibbetts I abolition of an unharmed plaintiffs' private right of action makes today's pronouncement a retroactive destruction of an accrued right. A substantive right conferred by a judicial act that is recognized as bearing the attributes of finality constitutes an accrued right. No amount of rhetoric can sidetrack this verity. It is the plaintiffs' private claim, not the attorney's fee, that is here at stake. [62] Had the claim survived today's opinion, plaintiffs' entitlement to a fee award might have continued as an issue to be dealt with. It is the demise of the private claim that extinguishes and removes from the case all other issues. ¶ 36 The court's reference to the defendant's liability-defeating defenses against the fee quest is equally inapposite. [63] Because the plaintiffs' private claim is dead under the axe of Walls, Patterson and of this court's Tibbetts II, nothing can make the fee quest viable again. There can be no counsel-fee award in abstracto. It must be attached to an adjudicated claim that is still in existence. The fee question died with the demise of the plaintiffs' private cause of action. ¶ 37 There are two parallel rules that stand in contradiction of one another which have co-existed since early statehood: one that is absolutely obedient to the settled law of the case without any exceptions [64] and the other which allows an open-ended escape hatch. [65] Obedience to these parallel rules is dictated solely by the court's unrestrained choice. That alone condemns the latter rule as a vehicle for the court's whimsical choosing rather than for its reasoned application of the law. ¶ 38 For support of its reliance on the open-ended escape hatch from settled law the court invokes the longevity of the authority for today's departure. Suffice it to say that `[i]t is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.' [66] Sound legal reasoning will not sustain a rule whose time of usefulness has passed. ¶ 39 The court attempts to justify its abandonment of settled law by invoking the palpably erroneous test. The latter is as vacuous and standardless as manifest injustice. [67] It says nothing about the degree of error that must be exceeded before it can be invoked. In applying this test the court is utterly free to find any error palpably erroneous. The testa mere verbal camouflageserves as a carte blanche for total judicial freedom from the norms of precedent. ¶ 40 If a decision is indeed palpably erroneous, the time to correct it is not after relitigation is barred by the command of issue preclusion, but rather when a petition for certiorari is still under timely review. [68] The plaintiffs should not be punished for this court's earlier inaction. ¶ 41 The court has impermissibly overextended its power to grant corrective relief upon timely-brought certiorari quest. The second bite it gives the loser today lies clearly on a collision course with constitutional restraints on retroactive lawmaking either by legislation or adjudication. It brazenly contravenes the standards of issue preclusion which stand incorporated into the body of Oklahoma law from the norms of Restatement of Judgments (Second) § 27 and from the Restatement's recent exposition in the U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence.