Court Opinion

ID: 9763734
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:53:56.169824+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:57:39.082903
License: Public Domain

*326CLIFFORD, J.,
dissenting.
It is not entirely clear to me what Disraeli had in mind when he observed that there are two things the public should never see being made: sausage and the law.1 But I venture the notion that the remark aptly fits the process in which the Court has engaged today.
We have before us in N.J.S.A. 18A:37-3 a statutory relic, created but a few short years after the Civil War, prior even to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, in the “spare-the-rod” era. There is not the faintest hint of what moved the legislature to come up with this curiosity, other than some vague idea of discipline of pupils in the public schools. It has until recently been permitted to lie, unused, unrecognized, and unwanted, in the state of desuetude to which it had mercifully been consigned. When a modern-day legislature sought to address the problem of malicious acts of vandalism by young people, it wisely ran right over this sorry reminder of times past and enacted L. 1965, c. Ill, currently codified in N.J.S.A. 2A:53-14 and 15, and supplemented it by L. 1970, c. 246, found in N.J.S.A. 2A:53-16 and 17. These statutes represent a balanced treatment of the nexus between “vandalism” and “parental neglect of child-supervision.” See N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-14.
In the meantime their forebearer remains on the books in N.J.S.A. 18A:37-3. Rather than deliver to it the sockdolager it so richly deserves, the Court encourages its resurrection. It does so not by interpreting that enactment but by inventing a new one. It thereby not only gives its blessing to unsound policy — the statute will, I suspect, impact largely on the poor and can be used to visit liability upon the parents of children who have remained immune to their parents’ best efforts at the world’s most difficult job, parenting — but also perpetuates an *327enactment riddled with constitutional defects. Those defects are spelled out in Judge Crane’s perceptive dissent below, 173 N.J.Super. at 212. I agree with him in all respects and vote to reverse.
For affirmance — Chief Justice WILENTZ, and Justices SULLIVAN, PASHMAN, SCHREIBER, HANDLER and POLLOCK —6.
For reversal — Justice CLIFFORD — 1.

 See Matter of Estate of Shields, 224 Kan. 604, 605, 584 P.2d 139, 140 (1978) (McFarland, J., dissenting). The epigram is sometimes attributed to Bismarck, even though it does not sound much like the Iron Chancellor. See In re Petition of Graham, 104 So.2d 16, 18 (Fla.1958).