Court Opinion

ID: 9611070
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 03:51:39.152205+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:09.693742
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE SHEA
concurring:
I join in the decision of the majority, but I express reservations to the trial court’s wholesale adoption of the findings and conclusions of the prevailing party. In Tomaskie v. Tomaskie (1981), Mont., 625 P.2d 536, 538, 38 St.Rep. 416, we stated that is wise practice for the trial court to prepare and file its own findings and conclusions” and that “[i]t is becoming increasingly apparent to this Court, however, that the trial *364courts rely too heavily on the proposed findings and conclusions submitted by the winning party. That is wrong! See Canon 19, Canons of Judicial Ethics, 144 Mont. at xxvi-xxvii.”
Notwithstanding this message, the trial courts are still too often engaged in the wholesale adoption of the prevailing party’s proposed findings and conclusions, and yet, we seem to do nothing about it. I look at this practice no differently than I would a practice of this Court to ask each party to submit a proposed opinion to this Court along with its briefs, and then to adopt verbatim the proposed opinion of the prevailing party. I can just imagine the uproar of the trial bar and the public, and rightly so, if we were to do this.
I have previously expressed in detail my position on proposed findings and conclusions in my concurring opinion to Jensen v. Jensen (1981), Mont., 631 P.2d 700, 704, 38 St.Rep. 1109, 1113, and I see no need to belabor the point.