Court Opinion

ID: 9570551
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:24:10.357691+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:11:36.923728
License: Public Domain

STEWART, Justice:
(dissenting).
I dissent. The majority defines the statutory term “accident” to mean “unexpected result,” regardless of whether it is produced by a usual or an unusual event. The majority also defines the term “arising out of or in the course of employment” to impose legal and medical causation requirements. See U.C.A., 1953, § 35-1-45.
Curiously, the requirement of “legal causation” has two different meanings, depending upon the physical condition of the worker at the time he is injured. A worker having no preexisting medical condition or handicap need only prove that the accident was caused by a “usual or ordinary exertion.” But for congenitally handicapped persons and for persons who have suffered preexisting industrial injuries (which presumably have left the worker with some physical weakness or deterioration), legal causation has a different meaning. Such a worker may receive compensation only if the “employment contribution” to the internal breakdown is “greater than that of nonemployment life.”. According to the majority, such a worker must now prove that his internal breakdown was caused by “an unusual or extraordinary exertion” in order to establish the requisite legal causation, even though the majority opinion itself criticizes at length the “usual-unusual distinction as a means of proving causation.” How the majority can reject that standard for persons having no preexisting condition, yet embrace that standard for persons with preexisting conditions, is baffling.
Furthermore, the difference between the “unusual or extraordinary exertion” which a worker with a preexisting condition must demonstrate and the “usual exertion” which a person with no preexisting condition must demonstrate is far from clear. The latter standard is to be judged with respect to the “ ‘normal nonemployment life of this or any other person.’ ” The Court emphasizes that the “precipitating exertion must be compared with the usual wear and tear and exertions of nonem-ployment life, not the nonemployment life of the particular worker.” What the term “usual wear and tear and exertions of non-employment” means is not defined by the *30majority. The few examples set out do little to explain the concept aimed at, other than to suggest that the term means something more than simple, life-sustaining activities.
I wholly fail to understand why persons who have a preexisting condition should be placed in the disadvantaged position, indeed the near-remediless position, that the majority opinion imposes upon them. The purpose of the Second Injury Fund is to provide compensation for workers who have preexisting medical conditions and therefore run a greater risk of injury when they expose themselves to the hazards of the work place. But the law should encourage such persons to work rather than encouraging them to abandon the work force for some kind of unearned support.
This Court has repeatedly stated that the Second Injury Fund was designed to encourage employers to hire persons with preexisting conditions by spreading the risk throughout the industry to assure such persons that their injuries will be cared for without imposing extraordinary liabilities on the employers who hire them. Intermountain Smelting Corp. v. Capitana, 610 P.2d 334, 337 (Utah 1980); McPhie v. United States Steel Corp., 551 P.2d 504, 505 (Utah 1976). Society certainly ought to favor those policies which encourage people to work, rather than policies that deter employers from offering gainful employment to those who have a higher risk of work-related injury. There is little personal or social benefit from a policy that tends to discourage persons from working because of prior injuries or disabilities.
Further, it is fundamentally unfair and flatly inconsistent with the basic purposes of the workmen’s compensation laws to impose higher standards for compensation on those with preexisting medical conditions than on those without. Tort law generally does not do so. A defendant in a negligence action is required to take the victim as the defendant finds him; whatever unusual vulnerabilities the victim may have are disregarded. That principle should not be, and until now has not been, different in workmen’s compensation law, which is really a substitute for tort law remedies. In short, handicapped or previously injured persons who are injured by an industrial accident are simply discriminated against by having to meet the majority’s rigorous legal cause requirement.
I am also unable to understand how an administrative law judge, the Industrial Commission, or an appellate court is supposed to determine what “typical nonem-ployment activities” are “in today’s society,” as they now must do for the purpose of determining legal causation for workers with preexisting medical conditions. Does that mean what a typical sixty-five-year-old does or a typical twenty-one-year-old does during his or her nonemployment activities? Is it what a professional football player does in his leisure time or what a ballet dancer does? Is it what a sedentary worker does in his or her off-hours or what a forest ranger does?
Instead of defining a meaningful standard, the majority provides examples which supposedly illustrate the unarticulated principle. The examples “include taking full garbage cans to the street, lifting and carrying baggage for travel, changing a flat tire on an automobile, lifting a small child to chest height, and climbing the stairs in buildings.” These few examples, which I find to be arguable in any event since they reflect only what some people may do from time to time, do not substitute for a legal standard. I seriously wonder whether changing a flat tire on an automobile is a typical activity in today’s society, and I do not know how much luggage the “typical” individual lifts or how far he or she carries it. The point is that the majority has not set forth a workable standard at all. In fact, I have serious doubt that such an artificial construct as “typical nonem-ployment activities” will produce more fair and rational decisions than our past cases. The majority simply assumes a “typical” individual for the purpose of establishing a rational standard. Unfortunately, disabilities happen to real people, not to “average” people, and the law has always recognized *31as much. In short, I do not think that the majority’s newly established standard will produce decisions one whit more consistent or rational than those produced in the past.1
The majority also holds that an injured person must prove that the disability is “medically the result of an exertion or injury that occurred during a work-related activity.” With a degree of hope that I think is unwarranted, the majority states that “[t]he medical causal requirement will prevent an employer from becoming a general insurer of his employees and discourage fraudulent claims.” I am fearful that that hope is seriously misplaced.
Certainly Professor Larson, largely the source of the Court’s new standards and analysis, is highly acclaimed in this field of law, but there is much to be said for the case-by-case approach in hammering out legal doctrine, even if it does on occasion produce inconsistencies. I readily concede that present law needs to be rationalized and that some cases should be overruled because they are hopelessly inconsistent with other cases, but I do not believe that the law needs to be revolutionized in such a manner as to defeat those humane policies intended to allow for the injuries of workers who come to the work place in an impaired condition.
I also join the Chief Justice’s dissent.

. In my view, the decisions of this Court are generally reconcilable with only a few glaring exceptions and most of them prior to 1980. That there are more inconsistencies the further back one goes in our body of law is not particularly unexpected. In any event, I doubt that the new approach will produce unwavering consistency over the years.