Court Opinion

ID: 9544910
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:03:21.6821+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:13:46.424619
License: Public Domain

TANZER, J.,
dissenting.
I dissent for the reasons stated in the opinion of the Court of Appeals. Additionally, I offer these general comments.
If ever a hard case made bad law, this one has. The court’s sympathy for wife’s plight leads it to carve a gap into the change-of-circumstances rule, supported neither *787by experience nor persuasive reason. Any practitioner or domestic relations judge will recognize as unwise this qualification of a rule which is rooted in experience and is a fundament, of domestic relations law in Oregon and elsewhere. I take at face value the concluding avowal that the holding is applicable only in unique situations. So unique, I expect, that McDonnal and McDonnal will be cited in future cases only in obligatory footnotes preceded by “cf” or “but see.”
Even in dissent, I wish to emphasize that the majority disfavors reliance on review provisions. For this court to allow parties and trial courts to defer decision of difficult disputes in order to obtain a present settlement agreement is antithetical to the entire notion of adjudication. I take small solace in the majority’s holding that it will only apply such a provision in exceptional situations.
A case can be made that wife’s health has deteriorated since the decree, contrary to the hopes (rather than reasonable expectation) of the trial judge. Even so, however, her earning capacity, being nil, has not deteriorated. The argument for a change is not persuasive and it affords no basis to modify husband’s decreed transitional burden into a lifelong one. It is not necessarily inequitable to require wife to look to other resources for her support. It is surely a wiser course than to tamper with a universally recognized, sound rule of law.