Court Opinion

ID: 9753989
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:37:31.15076+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:46.243176
License: Public Domain

GODFREY, Justice,
with whom CARTER, J., joins, concurring.
I have no doubt of the correctness of the Court’s decision as a matter of substantive law. My only serious question relates to the applicability of the doctrine of precedent, or stare decisis.
It is an essential element of the doctrine of precedent that pronouncements by the Court have binding effect only when they are necessary to the decision of the specific case before the Court.
Hurd v. Hurd, Me., 423 A.2d 960 (1981), creates no real problem, for it was not necessary in order to reach the result in jbat case to hold that the privity requirement was an element of the products liability tort law of Maine before the 1969 statute became effective. As Justice Glassman pointed out in his concurring opinion in Hurd, 423 A.2d at 965-66, the decision of the trial court could have been easily affirmed on the basis of the trial court’s finding that plaintiff had failed to prove that the defendant manufacturer had been negligent.
Burke v. Hamilton Beach, Me., 424 A.2d 145 (1981), is another matter. Although the observations of the Court in that case on the purport of 14 M.R.S.A. § 221 were dictum, the rationale of the case — that privity had been a requirement of Maine products liability tort law before 1969 — was a pronouncement necessary for support of the decision. Burke was thus authoritative as a precedent on that point. If there were any possibility that, during the months since Burke was decided, reliance could have been placed on that decision by government administrators or by private law-makers in planning transactions or drafting documents or instruments, I would feel obliged, though reluctantly, to follow that case as binding precedent. In the absence of any possibility that such reliance interests could have developed, I regard the decision in Burke as so unjust that the doctrine of precedent must yield to the interest of correcting a serious mistake.
*945My non-concurrence in Burke, my separate concurrence with Justice Glassman in Hurd, and my concurrence in the present decision all stem from a persisting willingness to indulge a presumption that if the Law Court had been squarely presented a generation ago with the issue of the necessity of privity in tort actions, its decision would have accorded with the great weight of American cases and scholarly writings and with good sense. To ascribe the contrary, idiosyncratic view to the Law Court of those days on the basis of a few old ambiguous dicta fails to do it justice. Moreover, I do not think that the Legislature was ascribing such a view to the Court either. I find nothing in the 1969 or 1973 statutes that is inconsistent with an appreciation on the part of the Legislature that the Court had not yet ruled on the issue.