Court Opinion

ID: 9658494
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 21:02:09.3239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:55.886784
License: Public Domain

Smith, J.
{dissenting). The pair of cases  on misconduct, now before the Court, one of which is decided this date, are valuable to the profession despite the splintering of the Court. They serve to demonstrate better than any hypothetical illustration that rules of thumb framed in terms of “questions of fact” as opposed to “questions of law” will not serve as a substitute for a painstaking analysis of the underlying principles of law presented in a given situation.
There is no doubt, of course, that a simple issue of fact may, indeed, be presented to the appeal board. This was the situation in Knight-Morley Corporation v. Employment Security Commission, 350 Mich 397, where both divisions of an equally divided Court agreed that only a factual issue was presented. The evidence was conflicting. One division of the Court, *359for which spoke the writer hereof, held that in sneh situation, described as “one of the simplest possible issues of fact,” the circuit court was not justified in reversing the decision of the appeal board on the ground that its resolution of a controverted factual determination was contrary to the “great weight of the evidence.”
We expressly left “to future cases, as they arise, the enunciation of criteria for distinguishing the so-called questions of law from questions of fact in the more complex situations (Davis, Administrative Law, ch 20), to the degree that such is possible, and the factors involved in their resolution.”
One of such cases is now here. Here the issue is this: If a discharge purportedly for a specified act of misconduct is not supported, may the discharge be upheld, nevertheless, on general principles ? This is not the simple fact issue ruled upon in Knight-Morley, supra. The circuit judge and my Brother Souris say no, that if the incident asserted as grounds for discharge is not substantiated by competent testimony the discharge fails. They refuse to rake over the old coals to unearth some spark of defiance that at one time might have justified discharge but was then ignored. The evidence they look to in complying with the statutory requirement of “great weight”* is the evidence relating to the particular grounds of discharge asserted and relied upon.
My Brother Black, however, would look at the “total” evidence before the board, the evidence that the claimant was irritable, would flare up, and all the rest quoted by him. She was undoubtedly a cantankerous individual. But she was not discharged for being cantankerous. The store manager weighed her personality difficulties against his need for help (“I didn’t want to lay Mary off because I needed that *360kind of help with Christmas coming on”) and com doned her conduct. Later she was discharged, for the so-called grilled cheese sandwich episode, as to which the circuit court held there was no competent evidence.
The legal issue thus presented is whether the discharge of an employee for an alleged act of misconduct, can, if there is no competent evidence of such misconduct, be upheld on the ground that, well, anyway, she was hard to get along with. If so, then Mr. Justice Black is right. We would look at the total evidence, everything she did. If not, if we look only to substantiation of the particular incident alleged, Mr. Justice Souris is right, and since there was no competent evidence to support the discharge, hold that there has been error of law by the appeal board. For reasons indicated, I believe with Justice Souris that when the discharge, as here, is grounded upon certain, specific misconduct, it must be supported by evidence of that certain, specific misconduct. This is not to say that an employee may not be discharged for a course of misconduct. But here the discharge did not purport to be for such.
The Knight-Morley principle, supra, as to the finality of the appeal board’s factual determinations, would be applicable, in due course, to either position. Our division relates not to Knight-Morley but to the legal principles governing discharge for misconduct.
Subject to the above I agree with Mr. Justice Souris. The judgment should be affirmed. No'costs.
Edwards and Souris, JJ., concurred with Smith, J.

 Section 38 (CLS 1956, § 421.38 [Stat Aim 1959 Cum Supp § 17-.540]).