Court Opinion

ID: 9859042
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 18:21:50.568673+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:05:34.132618
License: Public Domain

LEVINE, Justice,
specially concurring.
The trial judge’s reading of the statute is precisely the same as mine would have been, were I sitting in his place. But unlike the trial court, I have had the benefit of the majority’s thoughtful and persuasive analysis. Like the trial court, I too believed that when the 1933 legislature bestowed upon the courts the authority to massage time constraints “until” the price of farm products equaled the cost of production, it meant “until” that event occurred and not thereafter. The majority, by changing the emphasis and order of the words of the statute, has also changed my mind.
Any doubt is further assuaged by force of the legal imperative that we uphold the validity of a statute when possible and apply the construction supporting its validity rather than the alternative that would defeat it. The majority has convincingly accomplished the feat.
While I acknowledge that the action of a subsequent legislature does not generally indicate the intent of an earlier legislature, I still find comfort in abandoning my errant view for the majority’s construction when I consider that the 1985 legislature could have acted in response to our Folmer and Heidt decisions as well as the seminal law review article on the subject: Vogel, The Law of Hard Times: Debtor and Farm Relief Actions of the 1933 North Dakota Legislative Session, 60 N.D.L.R. 489 (1984). That it did nothing fortifies my conclusion that the majority has correctly divined the legislative intent in its construction while paying heed most certainly to the spirit of the statute and with certainty enough to the letter of the law.
I thus concur in the rationale and result.