Court Opinion

ID: 9671615
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:40:22.447352+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:48:24.576561
License: Public Domain

PALMORE, Judge
(dissenting).
When a rule of property is abandoned, I believe that past transactions entered into in reliance upon it should be excluded from the effect of the opinion, as in the cases of Payne v. City of Covington, 276 Ky. 380, 123 S.W.2d 1045, 122 A.L.R. 321 (1938), and Hanks v. McDanell, 307 Ky. 243, 210 S.W.2d 784, 17 A.L.R.2d 1 (1948). Though such an opinion may theoretically constitute nothing more than dictum, nevertheless it has the useful effect of providing guidance for future transactions without and ex post facto divestiture of rights heretofore considered to have been settled.
In this particular case I am concerned not so much for the Fielden Townsend heirs, who claim a windfall by virtue of an absurd legal technicality that at long last is being recognized as such, but for their lessee, which has invested its money in reliance on past assurances by the court that this technicality was indeed the law. It seems to me that the administration of justice ought always to be recognized as an intensely practical matter, not a wonderland of witchcraft and magic words. If there be those who would say a prospective opinion smacks of “legislation,” what other and more euphemistic term might be chosen to describe the manner in which the whole body of the common law has developed? It is just a matter of semantics. But no matter what label we put on it, when a court decides it can no longer live with a principle on which it knows innocent parties have relied in the investment of their money, practical justice requires their protection. This can be accomplished only if the court, recognizing that although technically its decision in one case is not the law in another it customarily will be relied upon as if it were, is willing to subject its common law jurisprudence to the spirit of Const. § 19.