Opinion ID: 4541656
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Selective Prospectivity, Generally

Text: This Court’s retroactivity jurisprudence derives from that of the Supreme Court of the United States, see, e.g., Blackwell, 527 Pa. at 183, 589 A.2d at 1099, and accordingly, we begin with a discussion of the development of relevant principles at the national level. By way of background, Employer seeks an application of Protz that is selectively prospective, in that the ruling that Section 306(a.2) is unconstitutional was applied to the Protz case itself, but Employer has sought and seeks at least a modified application in Claimant’s case.9 The question of whether, or to what degree, courts should consider curtailing the normal, retroactive application of certain new rulings has been the subject of intense 9 “Selective” or “modified” prospectivity is the application of a decision to the parties in the case in which the decision announcing a new rule is rendered, but thereafter only to parties whose conduct occurs after the announcement. See Lunsford v. Saberhagen Holdings, Inc., 208 P.3d 1092, 1095-96 (Wash. 2009). A decision is purely prospective if it is not even applied to the litigants before the court upon announcement of the new rule. See id. Retroactivity entails extending the application of a decision into the larger sphere of acts occurring before the announcement. See id. Again, Employer also seeks modified prospectivity on another plane, since it asks for a credit, in the form of an allowance for three years of partial disability under the Section 306(a.2) regime, toward the 500 weeks of partial disability available under the statute should Claimant’s benefits again be converted to the partial-disability track. See supra note 4. [J-95-2019][M.O. – Saylor, C.J.] - 12 debate amongst judges and legal theorists at the national and state levels.10 At a theoretical level, on the one hand, it had long been maintained that judges discover but do not make law; rather, the role of the judiciary is to explicate governing legal precepts already in existence. See, e.g., Linkletter, 381 U.S. at 622-23, 85 S. Ct. at 1734 (relating the traditionalist perspective that it was the duty of the court . . . not to ‘pronounce a new law, but to maintain and expound the old one’” (quoting 1 W ILLIAM BLACKSTONE COMMENTARIES 69 (15th ed. 1809))). Upon this understanding, judicial decisions naturally will apply retroactively. See, e.g., James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Ga., 501 U.S. 529, 535, 111 S. Ct. 2439, 2443 (1991) (plurality) (indicating that the practice of full retroactivity was “overwhelmingly the norm”). Significantly, courts and commentators for many years treated this view of the judicial function as a key distinction between judicial and legislative pronouncements, the latter of which normally apply prospectively.11 10 See, e.g., Lemon v. Kurtzman, 411 U.S. 192, 198, 93 S. Ct. 1463, 1468 (1973) (plurality) (“[R]econciling the constitutional interests reflected in a new rule of law with reliance interests founded upon the old is ‘among the most difficult [processes] which have engaged the attention of courts, state and federal.” (citing Chicot Cty. Drainage Dist. v. Baxter State Bank, 308 U.S. 371, 374, 60 S. Ct. 317, 319 (1940)); Beavers v. Johnson Controls World Servs., Inc., 881 P.2d 1376, 1377 (N.M. 1994) (characterizing the selection between mandatory retroactivity as contrasted with selective prospectivity as involving “one of the great jurisprudential debates of the twentieth century”); compare, e.g., Bradley S. Shannon, The Retroactive and Prospective Application of Judicial Decisions, 26 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y 811, 874-76 (2003) (advocating for a firm rule of retroactivity), with Beryl H. Levy, Realist Jurisprudence and Prospective Overruling, 109 U. PA. L. REV. 1, 25-30 (1960) (making the case for selective prospectivity). 11 See, e.g., Landgraf v. USI Film Prods., 511 U.S. 244, 265, 114 S. Ct. 1483, 1497 (1994) (“[T]he presumption against retroactive legislation is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence, and embodies a legal doctrine centuries older than our Republic.” (emphasis added)). See generally Elizabeth E. Beske, Backdoor Balancing and the (continued…) [J-95-2019][M.O. – Saylor, C.J.] - 13 Nevertheless, when courts have overruled past decisions or otherwise altered settled (or ostensibly settled) expectations, intractable questions have arisen about the fairness of applying such rulings to conduct undertaken in reliance upon a different legal regime. See, e.g., Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U.S. 12, 26, 76 S. Ct. 585, 594 (1956) (plurality) (Frankfurter, J., concurring) (“We should not indulge in the fiction that the law now announced has always been the law. . . . It is much more conducive to law’s selfrespect to recognize candidly the considerations that give prospective content to a new pronouncement of law.”). For this reason, for a time, the Supreme Court of the United States experimented with widening the boundaries of prospective, or selectively prospective, decision-making in seminal cases such as Linkletter, 381 U.S. at 629, 85 S. Ct. at 1738 (developing a doctrine by which the Court could deny retroactive effect to a newly announced rule of criminal law), and Chevron Oil, 404 U.S. at 106-07, 92 S. Ct. at 355-56 (extending the Linkletter doctrine to civil cases). See generally Rhodes, Loving Retroactivity, 45 FLA. ST. U.L. REV. at 396 (depicting the Linkletter-Chevron line of cases as entailing the “high tide of nonretroactivity”). In later decisions, however, exemplified by Griffith, 479 U.S. 314, 107 S. Ct. 708, the Supreme Court of the United States retrenched and adopted a firm rule requiring retroactive application -- initially in the criminal-law context -- to cases pending on direct appeal. See id. at 328, 107 S. Ct. at 716; see also Harper, 509 U.S. at 97, 113 S. Ct. at 2517 (depicting Griffith as imposing a “ban against ‘selective application of new rules’” (citation omitted)). The Griffith Court expressed concern that selectively prospective decision-making was too greatly in tension with the nature of judicial review, which requires the adjudication of specific cases, “and each case usually becomes the vehicle (…continued) Consequences of Legal Change, 94 W ASH. L. REV. 645, 652-53 (2019) (discussing “a thousand years of presumed retroactivity” of judicial rulings). [J-95-2019][M.O. – Saylor, C.J.] - 14 for announcement of a new rule.” Griffith, 479 U.S. at 322-23, 107 S. Ct. at 713. Furthermore, the Court reasoned, once a new rule has been applied to the litigants in a specific case, “the integrity of judicial review requires that we apply that rule to all similar cases pending on direct review.” Id. at 323, 107 S. Ct. at 713.12 See generally Francis X. Beytagh, Ten Years of Non-Retroactivity: A Critique and Proposal, 61 VA. L. REV. 1557, 1624 (1975) (positing that “the single most significant difficulty presently posed by [prospectivity] -- unequal treatment of those similarly situated resulting solely from the sheer happenstance of the judicial calendar”), cited in Beavers, 881 P.2d at 1382. Later, the Supreme Court came to characterize Linkletter balancing relative to cases pending on direct appeal as “unprincipled and inequitable.” Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 304, 109 S. Ct. 1060, 1072 (1989). As to civil matters, the same retrenchment occurred in Harper, 509 U.S. 86, 113 S. Ct. 2510, which extended Griffith to civil cases upon the admonition that, “[t]he Court has no more constitutional authority in civil cases than in criminal cases to disregard current law or to treat similarly situated litigants differently.” Id. at 97, 113 S. Ct. at 2517 (quoting Am. Trucking Ass’ns, Inc. v. Smith, 496 U.S. 167, 214, 110 S. Ct. 2323, 2350 (1990) (plurality) (Stevens, J., dissenting)). Accordingly, the Supreme Court largely ruled out the possibility of selective prospectivity across the wider range of cases.13 12 Parenthetically, it was clear from Griffith that the Supreme Court intended that new rules should not be applied to matters in which a judgment of sentence was final. See id. (“[W]e fulfill our judicial responsibility by instructing the lower courts to apply the new rule retroactively to cases not yet final.”). Again, the application of procedural rules may perhaps be viewed as an independent assessment in the analysis relating to claims that otherwise would be barred. See supra note 8. 13 See generally Rhodes, Loving Retroactivity, 45 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. at 390 (“The Supreme Court now abides by the doctrine that decisions applying new legal rules to the parties govern all pending and future noncollateral adjudicative proceedings, even if the operative events in that proceeding occurred under a different legal framework[.]”); (continued…) [J-95-2019][M.O. – Saylor, C.J.] - 15