Court Opinion

ID: 9459275
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:16:03.070062+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:06.252587
License: Public Domain

TAMM, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I cannot concur in an opinion that elevates to the dignity of legal dogma the facetious vaunt, “Heads I win — Tails you lose.” Again the majority flouts what was known among the ancients as “stare decisis” 1 (the nature of that doctrine is now imperfectly understood and possibly incapable of definition with the vocabulary that remains to us).
Craftily recognizing which side her bread is caviared on, our appellant skillfully acclaims by seizure those provisions of the now challenged will which provided largess to her and having exhausted available advantages and benefits she now brazenly challenges the validity of the very document whose terms she utilized to her own benefit. This subordination of veracity is, or course, carried out without any distasteful return to the estate of the assets she has received and utilized. My brethren, whose sincerity I do not question (to the pure all things are pure), with more feeling for a piquant image than for objective facts see in this situation the conduct of a dove rather than an albatross. To make a paradigm of appellant’s greed, at the possible expense of other named beneficiaries of testator’s declared intentions, is for me the jettisoning of virtually all the historically proven cases teaching that the seeker of justice must be a doer of justice. Our opinions through this century, presumably at least, recount a record of in jus*375tices put right by our - legal objectivity but my brethren’s majority opinion causes my admiration of our accomplishments to melt into suspicion. Current popular recognition of a code of mini-morals is strengthened by today’s ruling, since the court vaults the bounds of fairness principles and will undoubtedly shock the conscience of legal scholars. To validate appellant’s unconscionable chicanery upon the basis assigned by the majority certainly requires the most novel reasoning since Lewis Carroll.2
More distressing than the immediate impact of this majority opinion on the fortunes of those immediately involved herein, however, is the ease with which the court again narcotizes the earlier opinions which I naively thought had established and defined the law governing factual situations akin to our present record. Perhaps by today’s and tomorrow’s standards these are normal times and the majesty of the law is to be built upon an ever-changing proliferation of untested and unproved panaceas. The stream of time has washed away the dissoluble fabric of many other disciplines, but if it is to flood away from the courts the integrity of the law as a science producing certain rules of decision, then appellate courts will be reviewing by ambush. No doubt respect for the established tenets of the law is regarded as an idolizing of meaningless ancient landmarks by those who in their search for utopia cultivate the preposterous. It is a tired truth that courts’ opinions seriatim and subjectively working towards the “GREAT WHEN” end not on a note of exhaustion but of exasperation.3 Such brave but legally limpid judicial excursions are alternately blessed, then tarnished, then cursed. Although change is today’s great constant, legal wanderings far from the solid foundations of objective interpretations of governing case law edge precariously close to an outright abandonment of the basic principle that ours is a government of laws and not of men. Although the belief that the basic provisions of our law established a predictable cornerstone upon which is built the judicial machinery apparently went out with McGuffey’s readers, the hard fact remains that this so-called creative law has not established a track record for lasting solutions of mankind’s day-to-day legal problems. Undiscouraged, however, my brethren bravely pursue their uncharted voyage into THE LAND OF TRY AGAIN.
I write these words, not as a jeremiad, but in the belief that unless the courts adhere to the guidance of fixed principles, we will soon bring objective law to its sepulcher.

. See Bowen v. Howenstein, 39 App.D.C. 585, 590 (1913):
While it is undoubtedly the rule that a person who takes property under a will must be presumed to have elected to abide by the will in preference to his rights as an heir at law, in the absence, of course, of fraud, imposition, or misrepresentation, we have found no case holding that the temporary acceptance of such a benefit, resulting in no disadvantage to other parties, amounts to an estoppel. On the contrary, it has been held that the return of a legacy, the condition of the parties not having been changed, — that is, no prejudice having resulted from the temporary accept anee of the legacy, — leaves no room for an estoppel. (Emphasis supplied and citations omitted.)
Sec also Utermehle v. Norment, 197 U.S. 40, 57, 25 S.Ct. 291, 296, 49 L.Ed. 655 (1905) and cases cited therein:
As to what is the law relating to a party taking the benefit of a provision in his favor under a will, there is really no foundation to dispute the proposition that he thereby is precluded from, at the same time, attacking the validity of the very instrument under which he received the benefit.
See also Cennamo v. American Security & Trust Co., 318 F.Supp. 366 (D.D.C.1970). The wealth of state cases holding as we have held in the past is so great as to negate citation.

. See, e. g., L. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Orig. pub. 1865), and L. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (Orig. pub. 1872).

. An account of our confused and confusing roaming through the labyrinth of the insanity defense in criminal cases is a record of eighteen years from Durham v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 228, 214 F.2d 862 (1954), to United States v. Brawner, 153 U.S.App.D.C. 1, 471 F.2d 969 (1972), in which we unwaiveringly in each successive case abandoned an earlier profound declaration of what we had (temporarily as it turned out) declared would be the governing law. For trial courts and the bar, the law was recognized as being whatever we would declare it to be in our next opinion.