Court Opinion

ID: 9454498
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:48:03.282048+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:08.438767
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Chief Judge,
with whom COLEMAN and GODBOLD, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting:
I join unconditionally in the dissent of Judge Coleman. I would only add to it by emphasizing that — charged as we are with the duty to accept, try and pass on diversity cases — we are engaging in the wildest of guesses as to what the law of Florida is, or what the Supreme Court of Florida would say it is.
All of this adds up to the unfortunate consequence in this old, old case1 of the failure to use properly and exploit fully the remarkable tool of certification to the Supreme Court of Florida. Indeed, it is still not too late.
*1169Of course certification was once had where, on rehearing of our initial decision,2 we certified a question.3 But the real trouble was that the question certified was too limited, too restrictive, too narrow.4 The question stated zeroed in on only one phase — whether Florida law imposes on a manufacturer an absolute liability for death caused by using the product even though the manufacturer exercising reasonable human skill and foresight could not have anticipated its damaging effects.
The inadequacy of the certified question and the Florida Supreme Court’s answer to it5 was vividly recognized in our second opinion6 after certification and answer. With the four jury interrogatory answers, F.R.Civ.P. 49(b),7 which we then held were binding on a retrial, and the Florida answer to the certification that strict liability would exist even though the dangers of the product could not have been known to the prudent manufacturer, we had to face up to the now controlling issue of Florida law: whether the cigarettes were, on the trial record, unmerchantable as a matter of law because they were not reasonably fit and wholesome for their intended use, that is, to be smoked. Without a doubt the first trial record raised that question. Indeed, following certification on our second decision we held8 the evidence of causation more than ample. This evidence revealed the shocking medical opinion-fact that even with respect to “good” cigarettes — i. e., those manufactured in accordance with specifications and not “defective” from the presence of foreign matter — “the major factor that produces lung cancers in American males is smoking” and that “one in nine or ten” smokers does develop lung cancer. 325 F.2d 673, 676-678.
It remains the mystery wrapped in an enigma why we did not recertify an appropriate question to decide the issue that took a second expensive trial and a third expensive appeal, which produced a third decision 9 that is now supplanted by yet a fourth decision — the present opinion on rehearing en banc.
We know one thing for sure: no one knows just what the Supreme Court of Florida would say10 about the wholesomeness of a product that in one out of ten users brings about the dreaded cancer. Of course Florida has a great stake in fashioning the products liability standards as a sanction to a strong judicial policy of protecting Floridians from the consequences of products of such portent.
*1170Florida accepts without resistance or reluctance the now numerous cases we certify, and, as happened in this case11 its answers often demonstrate that we had indeed guessed incorrectly.12 With this court so divided,13 the minimum that should be done is to certify this now critical question to the Florida Supreme Court just as was done in effect by the Supreme Court’s summary reversal of Kaiser Steel, supra (note 12). Florida has the right to determine for its ever increasing millions and for the millions of much coveted perennial visitors whether a product that dooms one in ten to the terrible disease can ever be fit or wholesome, reasonably or otherwise.
Only one further thing need be mentioned to placate those “pedagogical purists”, Kaiser Steel, supra, 388 F.2d at 267 whose theme is a mixture of the worn-out claims that to decide and decide now is more important than to decide correctly, and that certification and other abstention devices are too time consuming and destine a case to an interminable career.
The fact is that in neither Hopkins nor Martinez (See note 12, supra) was the period of gestation from certification to answer nearly as long as the delay which this case has encountered in the course of its history in the federal courts.
My position, then, is a dual one. First I reject the idea that the enlightened Supreme Court of Florida will tolerate a commercial system that sells with impunity ostensibly innocuous products, but which in fact have lethal consequences.
Second, the question is so vital to Florida that the State should be given the opportunity to fashion its own policy standard through the available, workable mechanism of certification.
On all scores I therefore dissent.

. The suit was filed over a decade ago in December 1957.

. Green v. American Tobacco Co., 5 Cir., 1962, 304 F.2d 70.

. Green v. American Tobacco Co., 5 Cir., 1962, 304 F.2d 70, 85.

. It is set out in our decision, Green v. American Tobacco Co., 5 Cir., 1963, 325 F.2d 673, 674.

. Green v. American Tobacco Co., Fla., 1963, 154 So.2d 169.

. Green v. American Tobacco Co., 5 Cir., 1963, 325 F.2d 673, 675-677.

. See 304 F.2d at 85-86.

. See 325 F.2d at 676-678.

. Green v. American Tobacco Co., 5 Cir., 1968, 391 F.2d 97.

. Judge Gewin has described this quest in Stool v. J. C. Penney Co., 5 Cir., 1968, 404 F.2d 562:
“We therefore fall back on formulary surrogates to account for our mysterious application of an uncoined code. Thus where the controlling state law eludes the researcher, the court must attempt to ascertain the policy inclination of the state’s highest tribunal with regard to the matter in controversy.
“It is nevertheless patent that any rule which we vicariously adopt on behalf of the state courts will be substantially the product of conjecture. Accordingly, we are hesitant to attempt to second-guess the district court which has already ventured intrepidly into the phantom-law wonderland. Since our view of the state law is probably as much a guess as the district court’s, the latter cannot be designated categorically as wrong. Ironically enough, however, the district court can be erroneous. We cannot accept the premise that one guess is as good as another, for that would effectively eliminate appellate review in a substantial portion of the cases which come before this court.”
404 F.2d at 563 (footnotes omitted).

. Judge Rives in a wholesome exercise of self confession in the second opinion, 325 F.2d 673, 674, stated that the Florida answer “has saved this Court, through the writer as its organ, from committing a serious error as to the law of Florida which might have resulted in a grave miscarriage of justice.”

. See W. S. Ranch Co. v. Kaiser Steel Corp., 10 Cir., 1968, 388 F.2d 257, 264, n. 15, (dissenting opinion), reversed, 1968, 391 U.S. 593, 88 S.Ct. 1753, 20 L.Ed.2d 835; Martinez v. Rodriquez, 5 Cir., 1968, 394 F.2d 156, 157 n. 2; Hopkins v. Lockheed Aircraft Corp., 5 Cir., 1966, 358 F.2d 347, which produced two divergent Florida opinions, 201 So.2d 743, on rehearing, 201 So.2d 749.

. Judge Cameron dissented in the first two decisions, 304 F.2d 70, 77; 325 F.2d 673, 679. On the third appeal, Judges Coleman and Orie Phillips, Senior Judge of the Tenth Circuit found themselves in disagreement with Judge Simpson’s momentary dissent. And now several others join the split.