Court Opinion

ID: 9691689
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 20:58:32.508339+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:25.285915
License: Public Domain

JONES, Justice
(concurring in the result).
In concurring in the result affirming the lower Court’s judgment for defendant, I am constrained to comment on two aspects of the opinion.
First, I agree, that the federal decisions have precluded our further consideration of the propriety of charging the jury affirmatively on the issue of assumption of risk, i. e., the giving of plaintiff’s requested charge which included that portion of the F. E. L. A. which abolishes assumption of risk as a defense. As the opinion points out, Justice Frankfurter’s admonition to the effect that this concept is too complicated for the jury to understand has resulted in a consistent line of decisions upholding the trial court’s failure to give such charge where the issue is not injected by the defendant.
These holdings, in my opinion, reach the pinnacle of ridiculousness. Justice Frankfurter, with all his brilliance — -founded on his academic rather than his practical background — drew his conclusion on a false premise: that a jury, in the absence of any instruction as to assumption of risk, would not apply — consciously or subconsciously — this doctrine in its consideration of the issue of liability. It is ironic indeed that, on the one hand, he would credit the jury with such sophistication as would permit it to understand that in the absence of such charge the jury would necessarily not consider assumption of risk as a legal defense; while on the other hand, he distrusts the jury’s ability to understand the court’s instructions dealing with the ramifications of this legal doctrine.
In establishing the elements necessary to constitute liability, Congress in drafting the F. E. L. A. saw fit to affirmatively eliminate assumption of risk as a defense; and this, undoubtedly, for the reason that this concept had become so thoroughly engrained in our tort system. Paradoxically, the federal decisions now hold that juries will understand that they are to eliminate the application of this doctrine in their deliberation of such cases without any instruction to this effect, while Congress made no such assumption as to the legal profession in its enactment of the F. E. L. A.
I realize that, as relates to the instant appeal, the foregoing is but an exercise in futility; and, yet, one can always hope *25that reason and logic may ultimately prevail.
The second point deals with the use by an expert witness of other opinion evidence in the formulation of his expert testimony. In the context here applicable, I agree with the holding and the rationale of the opinion. I do not wish to be understood, however, as saying that in other contexts (e. g., referral by a treating physician to other doctors or medical technicians) every fact testified to by the expert witness must be independently proved as a predicate to such expert testimony.
This Court in State Realty Co. v. Ligon, 218 Ala. 541, 119 So. 672 (1929) held that a physician’s testimony as to condition of his patient may be based in part on the findings of other physicians such as x-ray examinations, blood tests, and the professional reports of physicians and nurses. While this rule has been somewhat refined by Clark v. Hudson, 265 Ala. 630, 93 So. 2d 138 (1956) and Prince v. Lowe, 263 Ala. 410, 82 So.2d 606 (1955), it has not been overruled. See also Taylor v. Atlantic Coast Line R. Co., 232 Ala. 378, 168 So. 181 (1936).