Court Opinion

ID: 9714096
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:30:30.726837+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:23.397413
License: Public Domain

O’Hara, J.
(concurring). Justice Smith and I regard it advisable
to write separately. We address our short concurrence in the result reached by Mr. Justice Kelly to the persuasive opinion of Mr. Justice Black, with which we cannot completely agree.
Our associates both state the controlling question here to be whether plaintiff’s injury arose “out of and in the course of” her employment. We agree. Mr. Justice Kelly depends chiefly on Murphy v. Flint Board of Education, 314 Mich 226, to support reversal. Mr. Justice Black relies particularly on Punches v. American Box Board Co., 216 Mich 342, in support of affirmance. He footnotes that Murphy ignores Punches. We find no conflict in the eases.
■ In Punches, a teamster was injured while driving his assigned team from his home to his place of employment. His employer’s foreman knew of and had approved of his practice in taking the team home to feed and tend them. The key finding by the industrial accident board was (p 349) :
“Driving and tending this team was the work decedent was paid for.”
In Murphy, a schoolteacher was injured while walking from school to her home. She was carrying books and examination questions on which she intended to work that evening. The decision recites (p 229) :
’ “No claim is made that the fact that she was carrying the books and qiapers referred to contributed in any way to the injury she suffered.”
The faet that both were traveling to or from work is not controlling. Justice Cardozo, quoted in Murphy at p 241 delineates:
“What concerns us here is whether the risks of travel are also risks of the employment. In that view the decisive test must be whether it is the employment or something else that has sent the traveler forth upon the journey or brought exposure to its perils.” 
Mr. Justice Black, we believe, has erroneously made driving the team in Punches synonymous with driving the automobile here.
*655Actually in the case at bar, the automobile is a stranger to the issues. Plaintiff was not required by her employer to drive or travel by ear. She was required by her employer to do work at home. Her accidental injury arose out of automobile travel, not out of the work she was required to do at home.
Absent some showing that the accidental injury in some way arose out of that work, we are constrained to agree with Mr. Justice Kelly.
Smith, J., concurred with O’Hara, J.