Court Opinion

ID: 9513404
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 22:35:20.975678+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:05:51.226798
License: Public Domain

NEUMANN, Justice,
concurring.
[¶ 22] I agree with much of the dissent. Clearly the district court was confronted with two difficult parties, as the dissent points out, and clearly much of Josephine’s difficulty was her own doing. I cannot help but sympathize with a trial court, constrained by docket currency standard, an increasing caseload, and a reduced number of judges, as it struggles to bring busy lawyers and litigants to court, and difficult cases to a conclusion. I have been there and done that, and the experience is very much like herding cats, as town folks might say, or as some of my rural friends might put it, herding pigs.
[¶ 23] Nevertheless, I concur in the majority opinion. The heart of that opinion is the injustice done by Curtis’s failure to timely supplement discovery, an injustice dismissed with two short sentences by the dissent. Curtis’s active concealment of the sale of the parties’ farmland by making a false answer to an interrogatory and by withholding documentary evidence until the very eve of the trial placed Josephine in a situation in which *445a fair trial was impossible without a continuance. In spite of Josephine’s recalcitrance and lack of cooperation, noted by the dissent, I believe Curtis’s blatant violations of our discovery rules created a situation so fundamentally unfair that a new trial is now required.
[¶ 24] William A. Neumann