Opinion ID: 1434260
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the trial tribunal's intra-court review mechanism for compensation claims before and after july 1, 1978

Text: Before examining the impact of the 1977 amendatory act both on intra-court re-examination of compensation claims and on review affordable dehors the trial tribunal, it is helpful first to explore the framework that was designed for the now-defunct State Industrial Court en banc. [4] While extant case law speaks of that corrective process in terms of appellate jurisdiction of the Industrial Court and the legislature referred to it as an appeal, [5] this court early recognized in Higgs v. State Industrial Commission [6] that the pre-1978 en banc court was to be regarded not as a separate appellate tribunal but as a division of a first-instance court. In Higgs this court noted that consideration of a claim before the court en banc was no more than a re-examination in the same forum of both law and fact questions formerly determined by a single trial judge of the same tribunal. Under the rule pronounced in Higgs, every trial judge's decision that is changed in an intra-court re-examination at once loses its viability and stands replaced by the decision that alters it. The latter then becomes the efficacious decision in the case and hence the only one that is reviewable when corrective relief is later sought by proceedings brought in this court. The intra-court re-examination concept first shaped by us in Higgs has some characteristics in common with the so-called appeal by trial de novo. [7] Both methods (a) afford a re-examination of all the fact and law issues which the initial tribunal was authorized to consider; (b) the later decision upon appeal is substituted for the former as the decision of the trial tribunal, and (c) in neither case is the decision under re-examination entitled to any presumption of correctness either before or after the re-examination process is carried to final completion. [8] The 1977 amendments now in force altered the earlier en banc re-examination design in but two aspects: (1) the intra-court authority to re-examine the trial judge's decision now resides in an assigned three-judge panel rather than in the en banc tribunal and (2) fact findings of the trial judge are now impervious to any alteration unless the panel finds them to be clearly against the weight of the evidence. The core teaching of Higgs remains unaffected by the amendatory act of 1977. Now and before, the decision reached on intra-court re-examination replaces by substitution that of the single judge and thereafter, when statutory review dehors the trial tribunal is invoked, it alone stands as the decision of the trial tribunal. [9] Ever since the trial tribunal's intra-court review scheme was first carried into our compensation law, [10] the institutional design was intended not to afford two layers of appellate process with varying standards of review but rather to implement a two-tier decisional system within the trial tribunal with but a single appellate remedy in this court (or now in the Court of Appeals). [11]