Court Opinion

ID: 9772970
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 17:34:13.0061+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:49.522593
License: Public Domain

George Rose Smith, Justice, concurring. I join in the majority opinion, but I take this opportunity to express my personal view that we should prospectively abolish the fellow servant doctrine. It was created during the industrial revolution, by court decisions, and rested on the theory that a workman was free to leave his employment at any time and therefore could not recover for the negligence of a fellow servant with whom he chose to work. Prosser, Torts, § 80 (5th ed., 1984); Harper fe James Torts, §§ 21.3 and 21.4 (1956). It was actually, a form of assumed risk, the courts taking the position that a servant assumed the risk of his fellow servant’s negligence and of dangers that were open and obvious. And, inasmuch as any slight contributory negligence completely defeated recovery, the fellow servant doctrine was a bar to recovery as between employer and employee. All those doctrines have been generally abolished by our legislature. Comparative fault has superseded contributory negligence and assumed risk. Ark. Stat. Ann. §§ 27-1763 and -1764 (Repl. 1979). The fellow servant doctrine has been superseded by the worker’s compensation law. Ark. Stat. Ann. § 81-1304 (Repl. 1976). The doctrine still exists, as an anachronism, in rare litigation between employers and employees not subject to the compensation law. It has no place in society today. It was judicially created and should be judicially interred.