Court Opinion

ID: 9758115
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:12:19.608834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:00:14.278847
License: Public Domain

HUTCHINSON, Justice,
concurring.
I join both the Majority Opinion by the Chief Justice and the Concurring Opinion by Mr. Justice Flaherty. I add, however, that I believe the ratio decidendi of both those opinions lies solely in the interpretation of the phrase “unfairly discriminatory” contained in Section 3(d) of the Rate Act. “Unfairly discriminatory” as a linguistic construct is, like “due process”, available for use in accommodating the *588changes in policy required by changing social conditions. Such constructs are indispensable in a government based on a written constitution. They enable its fundamental precepts to survive, even as their application alters under technological and social change.
This is not to say that the courts are free to rewrite the meaning of a constitution or statute at will. However, when a change in social policy in response to changed conditions has been objectively demonstrated by the people’s adoption of a constitutional amendment, it is incumbent upon the courts to read existing statutes in the light of the people’s newly enunciated policy.
The wisdom of that policy is no longer an issue in Pennsylvania. Nationally, the debate over the desirability of an equal rights amendment still rages in the political arena. Indeed, its proponents have recently suffered a defeat at that level in their efforts to write that policy into the federal constitution. For better or for worse, however, Pennsylvania has settled that issue in favor of ERA.
Thirteen years after our adoption of Section 28 of Article I, the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Amendment, I believe we must honor its command and consider sex discrimination of any kind “unfairly discriminatory” unless the legislature plainly tells us otherwise. Absent at least a causal relation between sex and accident incidence a difference in auto insurance rates between men and women is plainly an unfair discrimination based on sex. No causal connection is shown on this record. What does appear is only a statistical correlation between sex and the incidence of auto accidents. This correlation simply provides a convenient measuring rod for setting rate differentials occasioned by other factors not so easily identified or quantified. Such considerations of convenience are not enough to stand in the face of our ERA. Given our ERA’S clear statement of public policy in Pennsylvania, I see no need to raise potential federal questions of (a) whether the setting of insurance rates involves “state action”, (b) whether this state should adopt the standards developed under the Fourteenth *589Amendment for detecting its presence or (c) how the standards should be defined in the light of Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 95 S.Ct. 449, 42 L.Ed.2d 477 (1974), Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis, 407 U.S. 163, 92 S.Ct. 1965, 32 L.Ed.2d 627 (1972), and Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 68 S.Ct. 836, 92 L.Ed. 1161 (1948). On those issues I express no opinion, and, believing the Majority Opinion also refrains from such speculation, I join it.
I also join Mr. Justice Flaherty because without the Pennsylvania ERA, or some other affirmative statement of legislative policy, the Insurance Commissioner would lack the authority to redefine the statutory phrase “unfairly discriminatory” in the face of the insurance industry’s long standing practice of utilizing gender based rate differentials. We are obligated to affirm his action only because the ERA objectively demonstrates, in the most forceful possible way, the feeling of the people of this state that sex discrimination is unfair.
FLAHERTY, J., joins this concurring opinion.