Court Opinion

ID: 9538598
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:38:07.123943+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:57:59.706006
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Chief Justice,
with whom KAUGER, Justice, joins, concurring in result.
The court concludes that the trial judge committed no error by instructing the jury on unavoidable accident. Unlike the court’s opinion, I would not answer today the appellant’s (plaintiff at nisi prius) argument that an unavoidable accident charge is improper under all circumstances. The settled-law-of-the-case doctrine clearly bars her from pressing this contention in the instant appeal.
In her earlier quest for corrective relief in this very case appellant had urged that an unavoidable accident instruction is improper under any proof. The Court of Appeals firmly rejected this notion as an incorrect exposition of our law.1 Its ruling conclusively adopts the norm to be followed in all stages of this litigation. Under the settled-law-of-the-case doctrine the appellant is clearly barred from relitigating any issue decided in the previous appeal of this case.2
I would hence hold today that the appellant may not in this appeal press her argument for this court’s condemnation of an unavoidable accident instruction as improper in all cases. I would confine our corrective process to a review of the evidence elicited at the most recent trial, and I would conclude that the record proof adduced at nisi prius is sufficient to support the questioned jury charge on unavoidable accident.

. In the earlier appellate disposition reversing judgment on defendant’s verdict (No. 65,183, January 30, 1987), the Court of Appeals concluded in an unpublished opinion that ”[a]n instruction on unavoidable accident should not be given unless there is evidence from which a jury could reasonably find that the accident occurred without the negligence of either party." (Emphasis added.) The case was remanded for a new trial.

. Reconsideration of questions resolved in a previous appeal is forbidden by the settled-law-of-the-case doctrine. Mobbs v. City of Lehigh, Okl., 655 P.2d 547, 549 (1982); Reeves v. Agee, Okl., 769 P.2d 745, 756 n. 46 (1989); Smith v. Owens, Okl., 397 P.2d 673, 675 (1965) (the court’s syllabus ¶ 1); Board of Education v. Philadelphia Fire & Mar. Ins. Co., 156 Okl. 7, 9 P.2d 737 (1932) (the court’s syllabus ¶ 2). See also Veiser v. Armstrong, Okl., 688 P.2d 796, 799 (1984).