Court Opinion

ID: 9573113
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:47:56.912003+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:37:00.458439
License: Public Domain

OP ALA, Vice Chief Justice,
dissenting.
I recede from the court’s opinion and from its judgment. On this record, I would find that, regardless of the parties’ earlier agreement, Humphries conducted the sale in suit not as Robertson’s agent, but as either principal (acting solely for himself and without an undisclosed principal) or as Robertson’s broker dealing under an implied net list price arrangement. Because Humphries is not accountable as a fiduciary, I would allow no recovery against him.
Today’s pronouncement fails accurately to target these critical issues in contest here and below, affords a flawed analysis of the claim’s essential characteristics, and hence applies misguided notions of the corrective process that is the parties’ due on review of this case.
Nothing in the settled-law-of-the-ease doctrine counsels against a meaningful reexamination of the central issue now on review in this appeal. It is clearly not too late today for this court to settle, once and for all, the true legal status of Humphries vis-a-vis Robertson at the critical point in controversy — when the transaction came to be consummated.1 The law inexorably commands that this decision not be rested solely on the text of these individuals’ earlier contract. Rather, the resolution must be made on the basis of all relevant facts that surrounded the transaction and transpired through the sale’s completion. For a proper assessment of the dispositive issue in contest the proof to be considered would have to include the seller’s unqualified acceptance of the net list price.2

. The court’s earlier pronouncement in Hum-phries I, Robertson v. Humphries, Okl., 708 P.2d 1058 [1985], neither reaches nor resolves Hum-phries' status at the sale’s consummation. It does not prescribe the legal norm that is to guide the trial judge on this central issue at retrial. Questions not settled by a prior opinion are open for examination in a later appeal in the same case. See Reeves v. Agee, Okl., 769 P.2d 745, 756 [1989],

. Enterprise Mgmt. Consul. v. Tax Com’n, Okl., 768 P.2d 359, 362 [1988],