Court Opinion

ID: 9716543
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:43:19.895196+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:46.719079
License: Public Domain

SHEPARD, Chief Justice,
dissenting.
If the past is indeed prologue, members of today's majority will spend the next few years explaining why victims of other defective products cannot seek damages even though victims of asbestos can.
The explanations may prove difficult. Today's opinion neither defines the boundaries of the exception it creates nor pro*388vides so much as a fig leaf justifying such judicial creativity.
By way of providing definitions, the majority tells us only that asbestosis victims are being allowed to seek recovery because they claim they were injured by a product that enters the body and takes a long time to cause harm 1, making it virtually impossible to predict which future product liability claimants will by luck of the draw find themselves the happy holders of a judicial exception to Indiana's statute of repose.2
We do know that the unlucky future claimants will include people like those injured in airplane crashes who claim defective manufacture or design of an aircraft that crashes thirteen years after delivery. The victims in such cases clearly could not know they would have a cause of action until after the statute of repose had run. Their advocates appeared in this Court eight years ago to argue strongly against the injustice of a statute which bars a claim forever even before it accrues. Dague v. Piper Aircraft Corp. (1981), 275 Ind. 520, 418 N.E.2d 207 (Brief for Plaintiff-Appellant at 7-8). On that occasion, today's majority joined to say that the date of the accrual is of no moment. The courts are obligated, Justice Pivarnik said then, to accept the legislature's judgment that the action should be completely barred unless it is brought "within ten years after the product is first delivered to the initial user or consumer...." Dague v. Piper Aircraft Corp. (1981), 275 Ind. 520, 418 N.E.2d 207, 210.
Today, the majority distinguishes Dague on the grounds that it "dealt with product failure," by which I presume is meant a final structural or mechanical failure preceding the crash. Actually, the claims in Dague centered on aircraft design, but one is led to wonder how Dague would have turned out had the plaintiff been able to plead a slow deterioration of badly manufactured metal, deterioration leading ultimately to failure and crash,. Would John Dague's widow have been barred had she been able to argue that her husband was the victim of a "slow, progressive, undetectable injury"? Apparently, she would have been told simply that defective asbestos is an exception to Indiana's statute of repose and defective metal is not.
The majority creates this exception by rewriting a statute which is a model of legislative clarity: "[AJny product liability action in which the theory of liability is negligence or strict liability in tort must be commenced within two (2) years after the cause of action accrues or within ten (10) years after the delivery of the product to the initial user or consumer...." Ind.Code § 83-1-1.5-5. The majority claims to find some support for this rewriting in the Court's determination that the word "ac-erued" in the same statute should be construed as a discovery provision. Barnes v. A.H. Robbins Co. (1985), Ind., 476 N.E.2d 84. In defining a word left undefined by the legislature, however, a court acts within very traditional boundaries of statutory interpretation. With respect to the statute of repose, there is no need to put any English on the ball by interpreting an ambiguous word. The statute says that actions must be brought within ten years (or twelve) of delivery. One cannot legitimately say that such a simple action as we took in Barnes drives today's decision.
The best explanation I can find in the majority opinion of why it elects not to follow the legislature's direct command is that it "would be inconsistent with our system of jurisprudence." (Slip op. at 387). As Judge Easterbrook suggested in *389certifying this question to us, accepting those grounds would lead to general abrogation of statutes of repose. Covalt v. Carey Canada, Inc., 860 F.2d 1434, 1440 (7th Cir.1988).3 If there is a principled basis for singling out one class of injured parties, victims of asbestosis, and shutting out all other defective product victims, I fail to discern it in the majority opinion.
Certainly, one could understand declining to enforce a statute on constitutional grounds, and statutes of repose generate frequent constitutional challenges. As for the federal constitution, of course, the Seventh Circuit has already rejected claims that Ind.Code § 83-1-1.5-5 violates the fourteenth amendment's due process and equal protection provisions. Pitts v. Unarro Industries, Inc., 712 F.2d 276 (7th Cir. 1983). As for state constitutional claims, Justice Dickson correctly points out that the statute is still susceptible to challenges under Article 1, sections 12 and 23 of the Indiana Constitution and proposes that we undertake to review the constitutionality of the statute under these two sections. Al though I customarily respond with alacrity to such proposals,4 such a determination in this case would require raising and resolving a constitutional question in response to a simple question of statutory construction. The parties have not even cited section 28's privileges and immunities clause, and although plaintiffs do mention the open courts provisions of section 12, the statute's constitutionality is not squarely before us in this litigation.
Even if it were squarely put, I would be reluctant to make a constitutional declaration in answering a certified question, though I recognize that some supreme courts see little difficulty to doing so. Seq, e.g., Lucas v. United States, 757 S.W.2d 687 (Tex.1988). Courts ought to foreswear declaring on the constitutionality of statutes unless cireumstances demand no other response. While I would not shrink from addressing Indiana constitutional issues should parties choose to litigate these cases in Indiana's courts, addressing them on renvoi from Chicago strikes me as a little strange.
Judges determined to nullify statutes customarily feel constrained to ascribe their determination to neutral legal principles. Such constraint is not apparent today.

. The majority refers to asbestos as a "foreign substance," seeming to suggest that the statute of repose does not apply because asbestos is not a product for purposes of Ind.Code § 33-1-1.5-5. The legal basis for the plaintiffs' claims, however, is that asbestos is a product within the meaning of Ind.Code §§ 33-1-1.5-1 through 33-1-1.5-8. Whether the term "foreign substance" is intended to have a different legal meaning is unclear.

. Will those who claim that use of saccharin contributed to cancer fit under this "foreign substance/long-term harm" rule? Will adults claiming injury from childhood exposure to lead paint fit under it? Will the rule apply to homeowners seeking to pursue radon claims notwithstanding the statute of repose contained in Ind.Code § 34-4-20-2?

. There is a glimmer of justification in the majority's assertion that the "primary purpose" of statutes of repose is "recognizing the improvements of product design and safety." This treats as a throwaway line the complex legislative task of striking an economic balance that both protects individual consumers from defective products and provides encouragement for the introduction of new products. See eg., Epstein, The Temporal Dimension in Tort Law, 53 U.Chi.L.Rev. 1175 (1986); Markin, A Statute of Repose for Product Liability Claims, 50 Ford-ham L.Rev. 745 (1982).

. See Shepard, "Second Wind for the Indiana Bill of Rights," 22 Ind.L.Rev. 575 (1989).