Court Opinion

ID: 9426655
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:36.184525+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:02.209250
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stevens,
dissenting in part.
Petitions for rehearing perform the wholesome function of providing the losing litigant with a legitimate forum for adverse comment on an adverse decision. Appellate judges soon learn to discount hyperbole in such petitions.
Judges who are reversed by a higher court sometimes need a similar outlet, particularly when they remain convinced that their original decision was correct, For this reason opinions on remand should occasionally be read with tolerance and understanding, and the question whether this Court's mandate has been violated should be answered by reference to the judgment entered by the lower court rather than by reaction to a few unnecessary and unfortunate sentences *505in a separate opinion joined by only two of six members voting.
In 1975 this Court held § 15-2-1 of the Utah Code unconstitutional and directed the State of Utah to eliminate that statute’s discrimination between males and females. Utah was free to select the age of 21 or the age of 18 as the age of majority for all its citizens. Thereafter as Justice Ellett pointed out in his separate opinion, the "Legislature of Utah, in an attempt to satisfy the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, passed an amendment to Section 15-2-1, U. C. A. 1953, so that it now reads: 'The period of minority extends in males and females to the age of eighteen years ....’”1 This amendment applied only after its passage in 1975.
When this case reached the Utah Supreme Court for the second time in 1976, that court held that the pre-amendment age of majority was 18. The reasons given in the three separate opinions of the Justices constituting the majority of the court are not, in my judgment, nearly as persuasive as Justice Maughan’s dissenting opinion. But, as Justice Maughan clearly recognized, the state court had the power to decide that the age of majority for both males and females under this statute prior to its amendment was either-18 or 21. The Utah Supreme Court has now held that it was 18. Even though the explanation of that holding makes reference only to females, once that determination has been made as a matter of Utah law, it applies by force of the Federal Constitution to males as well as females. Accordingly, both before and after the 1975 amendment to § 15-2-1, the statutory age of majority for both males and females in Utah was 18, not 21. The lower Utah courts are so interpreting the Utah Supreme Court decision.2
*506The judgment of the Utah Supreme Court was therefore consistent with this Court’s mandate, except, of course, for its disallowance of costs. Other than an order allowing appropriate costs, there is no need for any further proceedings (or opinion writing) in that court. I therefore respectfully dissent from this Court’s action.

 552 P. 2d 112, 113 (1976).

 Appellee’s statement to that effect in his Motion to Dismiss 3, 10, is not disputed.