Opinion ID: 2584112
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: After-Crafted Statutory Jurisprudence

Text: ¶ 5 Walls [13] and Patterson [14] constitute after-promulgated changes in the controlling statutory-law norm pronounced by and for Tibbetts I. [15] Both of these post- Tibbetts I cases declare harm to be an essential element of a consumer's private claim for the Act's violation. Tibbetts I explicitly and unequivocally pronounces the opposite view. Although Walls and Patterson departed from a substantive norm of statutory jurisprudence announced in Tibbetts I, they neither expressly overruled nor even gave mention to the persuasive authority of the then-extant Tibbetts I published opinion. The latter survives in fact and in the law books as an unrejected norm of judicially declared statutory law for this litigation at the time this cause returned to the trial court for the directed postremand proceedings. Today's pronouncement abolishes retroactively these unharmed plaintiffs' private claim under the Act together with their previously pronounced entitlement to an attorney's fee. By retroactively repudiating Tibbetts I, the court can escape neither the consequences of the settled-law-of-the-case doctrine (and of the issue-preclusion bar) nor of Oklahoma's constitutional restraints on after-crafted lawmaking, which restraints extend to substantive-law changes by jurisprudence no less than they do to those effected by legislative enactment. [16] This assessment expresses the crux of my dissent.