Court Opinion

ID: 9445505
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:31:08.770919+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:17.909598
License: Public Domain

HARTIGAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring) .
I concur in the opinion of the court but I am constrained to comment briefly. We were informed in oral argument by counsel for the appellee that the district court in deciding this case had before it both the Ford and the Du Pont decisions. Moreover, the district court knew from the official Mississippi report that the MacPherson case, then approximately twelve years old, had been considered and rejected by the Mississippi Supreme Court sitting in the Ford case. Therefore, “reluctantly” Judge Day adopted the Ford holding since it, as the only binding and conclusive statement of Mississippi law on the issue, had not been expressly modified or overruled. Certainly the existence of the Ford case presented to the trial judge a question different from that in the Larrabee case, cited in the opinion of the court today, where there was no controlling Iowa decision on the precise question in issue.
We, however, have inferred from pure dicta in the Du Pont case and from the status of the law elsewhere on this issue that Mississippi is prepared to discard the Ford rule and adopt the modern'rule. I believe this is a sound inference since the dicta in the Du Pont case, though not expressly mentioning Ford, is sufficiently clear and the Ford rule is sufficiently outdated. Yet, in doing so I realize that we present a difficult problem for district judges when they must apply the Erie doctrine to situations wherein the considerations as between conflicting holdings and dicta are not as clearly defined as they are here. The question of how clear dicta must be to prevail over a prior controlling decision does not lend itself to easy solution.