Court Opinion

ID: 9811257
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 22:14:29.119591+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:11:00.916794
License: Public Domain

Seawell, J.,
dissenting: I believe the case of Hardison v. Hampton, 203 N. C., 187, 165 S. E., 365, is in all respects on all fours with the instant case and should be controlling. Succinctly stated the Hardison case holds that the legal effect of filing the report of the accident and injury by the employer as required by the Workmen’s Compensation Act in what is now G. S., 97-92, is to give the Industrial Commission jurisdiction of the employee’s claim and the power and duty of making an award, and is sufficient to satisfy the condition imposed by Sec. 24 of the Act — now G. S., 97-24 — although the employee himself had filed no formal claim with the Commission. The decision was not based on any phraseology used in making the report, but refers to the legal effect of the report itself.
In aid of the summary statement of the case furnished in the report, reference should be made to the bound volume of “Becords and Briefs,” Fall Term, 1932, No. 49. (See history of decisions and awards as affecting the cited sections contemporaneous with the Hardison case and subsequent thereto, in “North Carolina Workmen’s Compensation Act, Annotated,” by Professor M. S. Breckenridge and E. 0. Willis, p. 96, particularly first three paragraphs.)
Whether the statute under review is considered one of limitations or as stating a condition upon which an award may he made, it was obviously not intended as thus interpreted to be rigidly enforced in such a way as to demand that the jurisdiction of the Court can only be invoked, and its machinery may only be set in motion by formal application of the injured party to the Industrial Commission for relief, — as would be required to open the doors of the courts of law.
The Industrial Commission is an administrative board created for the summary settlement of matters assigned to its jurisdiction. Essentially its creation is a retreat from the formality, rigidity, prolixity, and uncertainty of the courts of law to a more simplified procedure in which adjustment and speedy relief are desiderata as much as certainty and *458security. Reviewing courts steeped in tbe juridical tradition bave not always envisioned the liberality which this entails as either possible or desirable; it is, nevertheless, essential to the purposes of the new forum and when it is denied these boards lose character and become unnecessary and costly diversions from the courts of law.
The Hardison case is in line with the humanitarian, economic and legal philosophy out of which the Workmen’s Compensation Act was born and deserves recognition in the case at bar.
Since the Industrial Commission assumed jurisdiction of the case and made an award covering the fees of the doctor — which it could only have done as an incident to its jurisdiction of the claim — it leads one to wonder how many persons may be allowed to ride in on a nonexistent jurisdiction, or one from which at least the person primarily and originally interested, and for whose benefit the Act itself was made, is excluded.
In my opinion the judgment of the court below should be reversed and the cause remanded to the Industrial Commission for a hearing upon the merits.