Court Opinion

ID: 9508128
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 21:28:20.654347+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:07:28.276532
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE SHEEHY,
dissenting:
P.J. McGraw is quick on the draw, and a high-paid insurance adjuster. Holcomb was sick, and a little bit thick, and any big words made him fluster.
“Impairment” is a word that when it is heard, its meaning is surely amorphous; and few lawyers can see that “disability” has a much different meaning for us. Lawyers, in fact, who construe the Act, are probably not aware of what might ensue to those workers who take words that they should beware of. Here Holcomb signed, as one who’s born blind, the petition McGraw had prepared. With his knowledge gap he walked into the trap which his untutored girlfriend had shared.
Constructive fraud is not something odd. It springs from a clear legal duty to be candid and open, and not try to rope in, a man in a deal that is sooty. It is founded on trust and good trustee must avoid all taint of deception. What Jett Holcomb saw in P. J. Mc-Graw was a trust in the law’s perception.
To the Workers’ Court credit it may now be said it saw through the insurer’s oration, and promptly recorded a fraud that was sordid as a bar to the law’s limitation. The Workers’ Court found that the fraud gave it ground to allow Holcomb’s suit though belated. But this Court, intent that the law not be bent, rejects what the Workers’ Court stated.
The lesson to learn for those who discern from studies of what we are doing is that most of this Court will haply consort with fraud if a worker is suing. Gone is the day when a lawyer could say that we follow the old legal chant, one we derive from an old Latin jive, Fraus et jus nunquam cohabitant. (Fraud and justice do not dwell together.)