Court Opinion

ID: 9565977
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:31:10.387628+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:18:27.590515
License: Public Domain

Judge Phillips
dissenting.
The majority holding that plaintiffs’ loss and damage occurred when defendants failed to timely file notice of claim with the Wilson estate and that only the amount of damage was then uncertain is contrary to both reality and the law, in my opinion. Plaintiffs suffered no loss whatever at that time and thus had no cause of action for the statute to run against, since neglect alone does not constitute a cause of action. Even though plaintiff had lost by defendants’ neglect the right to enforce the wrongful death claim against the general assets of the Wilson estate, that had not resulted in pecuniary loss at that time and there was no certainty that it would ever do so. This is because the value of the claim was uncertain and unknown, $50,000 worth of insurance was still available to pay it, and whether that amount would cover plaintiffs’ damages or whether it would not and loss would thereby be sustained, no one knew. Thus, to say that plaintiffs’ cause of action had nevertheless accrued because plaintiffs’ loss had occurred and only the amount was uncertain is a self-evident sophistry. Plaintiffs then had no cause of action. What plaintiffs then had, and all that they had, as both plaintiffs and defendants then knew, was a potential cause of action. If the value of the wrongful death claim turned out to be no more than $50,000, they knew that plaintiffs’ potential cause of action would remain in*364complete, since the amount was collectable from the insurance; but if the claim’s value exceeded $50,000, they knew that plaintiffs’ potential cause of action would become a complete one for the excess. And it was not until May, 1981, a year and a half after this case was filed, that the value of the wrongful death claim was determined to be $85,000 and plaintiffs’ cause of action against defendants for $35,000 became complete. That the value ultimately set by the jury exceeded $50,000 does not obviate the fact, however, that until then plaintiffs had no actual cause of action against defendants. Because, if the jury had established that the claim was worth only $50,000, or some lesser amount collectable from the available insurance, as it well could have done, nothing is clearer than that plaintiffs’ supposed cause of action against defendants would have vanished into nothingness, notwithstanding the theorizing to the contrary about nominal damages. A de-feasible interest in property the law authorizes; but causes of action that supposedly exist one day and are non-existent the next are an anomaly that the law has not yet recognized or dealt with, so far as my research reveals.
The judicial fiction that damage and loss occur and causes of action therefore accrue when negligence happens rather than when injury really occurs or is learned about leads to many anomalous and even pernicious results and it would be a great service to the law of this state if the Supreme Court abandoned it and returned to the sound principle that negligence causes of action accrue when the injury that is sued for occurs. That this fiction is a blemish on our jurisprudence that ought to be removed requires only a reading of the cases. In many cases since this wrong turn was made, including Jewell v. Price, 264 N.C. 459, 142 S.E. 2d 1 (1965) and Shearin v. Lloyd, 246 N.C. 363, 98 S.E. 2d 508 (1957), followed by the majority, the salutary principle, universally approved, that wrongdoers are not to profit by their own wrongs, was ignored and defendants were given the benefit of statutes of limitation running against plaintiffs even though the defendants’ negligence was secret, had caused no discernible injury, and the plaintiffs had absolutely no knowledge of it. And though it is universally conceded that the only legitimate purpose and function of statutes of limitations is to bar the enforcement of causes of action, once ripe, complete, and ready for adjudication, that have been permitted to wither and grow stale, yet the stat*365utes have been held to run against and even bar causes of action in this state before the injury sued for even occurred. State v. Cessna Aircraft Corp., 9 N.C. App. 557, 176 S.E. 2d 796 (1970). Which was inevitable, of course, and could have been anticipated when the Court first left the solid trunk of the law, which is that causes of action for negligence do not accrue until some real injury results therefrom, and started down the flimsy and fallacious limb of imaginary and theoretical injury. Nevertheless, what lawyer, or layman either, for that matter, can digest the proposition that the statute of limitations began to run against the State’s cause of action for Cessna’s airplane crashing into its building, not when the crash occurred, but four years earlier when Cessna sold the defective airplane to a stranger to the lawsuit? If any of the great satirists of Anglo-American jurisprudence, including Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens, ever imagined anything as absurd and unjust, they apparently concluded it was too exaggerated to be either amusing or believable.
And though all lawyers and judges know that the true policy of the law is to discourage unnecessary and hasty litigation, the plain, unavoidable implication of this decision and those it follows is that people should sue upon a mere indication of wrongdoing and wait until later to ascertain if any real damages develop. This detrimental and indefensible policy should be repudiated. Public interest requires that people be able to know what they are about and why before they take their grievances to court or even have a right to. The orderly adjudication of real disputes is the court’s business, not theorizing about imaginary disputes that are totally irrelevant to the practicalities of people deciding what to do about their legal rights and of lawyers advising them about them. For instance, if the Jewell’s had learned that their furnace was defective before it blew up, they would not have sued the seller and no lawyer worth his salt would have advised them to; they would have asked the seller to make the minor, inexpensive adjustment that would have made the furnace safe. And the cause of action that they theoretically had for a small repair bill, which was never incurred because they did not know repairs were needed, had less than nothing to do with the actual cause that they later had for the destruction of their home. The public does not expect people to sue others and subject them to embarrassment, expense, inconvenience and strain when only a theoretical injury *366has resulted; and if that is so, and I know perfectly well that it is, it is too plain for debate that statutes of limitation should not be running against their right to sue for real injuries that later occur.
Some blemishes in the law cannot be corrected or concealed by euphemisms, legal or otherwise; and will not be erased by either time or reiteration. That which is not so does not become so by repetition. Nor does the burden to correct this situation rest with the Legislature. Nothing in our statutes required the interpretation given to them by the Justices and the Justices should remove the interpolations made. Many other courts have done so.