Court Opinion

ID: 9794361
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:04:36.567068+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:14:47.290262
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Chief Justice,
with whom HODGES, Vice Chief Justice, joins, concurring.
I write separately to explain that I concur in today’s opinion and in the court’s judgment because the evidentiary materials in the record show none of the four defendants was in charge of serving or dispensing alcoholic beverages during the drinking episode from which harm is alleged to have arisen.
Today’s opinion correctly leaves undecided a cluster of questions, of which at least two come immediately to my mind: (1) Should the teachings of Brigance1 be extended to make a noncommercial provider of alcoholic beverages liable for serving liquor to one who was then known, or should have been known, to be intoxicated? and (2) If such conduct be declared actionable, what parameters of duty should be imposed on a “purely social host”2 entertaining visitors in a residential setting?
The birth of jurisprudence that would settle these questions must be postponed. Courts are not allowed to forecast what they might do about an issue that is not before them.3 It is indeed prudent that we today remain true to this principle by abstaining from speculating in gratis dicta about future pronouncements.4

. Brigance v. Velvet Dove Restaurant, Inc., Okl., 725 P.2d 300 (1986).

. Noncommercial servers of alcoholic beverages could well be divided into several distinct subclasses, each of which may warrant a different treatment for consideration of liability. Included in this rather large class of providers are individual residential social-purpose hosts, fraternities and sororities, business-related as well as social-purpose activities’ hosts entertaining in public, semi-public or purely private places outside of homes, employer sponsors, and promotional business entertainers. See Ronald S. Beitman, A Practitioner’s Guide to Liquor Liability Litigation 11-14; Walking The Line of Liquor Liability: Ohio Casualty Insurance Company v. Todd, 27 Tulsa Law Journal 69, 72 (1992).

. “Every judgment must be read as applicable to the particular facts proved or assumed to be proved, since the generality of the expressions which may be found there are not intended to be expositions of the whole law but govern and are qualified by the particular facts of the case in which such expressions are to be found.” (Emphasis added.) Lord Halsbury's famous passage in Quin v. Leathem [1901] A.C. 495 at p. 506, quoted in Rupert Cross, Precedent in English Law 37 (1961).

. Northeast Okl. Elec. v. Corp. Com’n, Okl., 808 P.2d 680, 683 (1991); Westinghouse Elec. v. Grand River Dam Auth., Okl., 720 P.2d 713, 718 (1986); see also Application of Goodwin, Okl., 597 P.2d 762, 765 n. 8 (1979).