Court Opinion

ID: 9489257
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:10:12.669886+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:25.290803
License: Public Domain

NIEMEYER, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join in Judge Hall’s opinion for the court but write separately to explain that my vote does not rest on the assumptions that the dissent attributes to the majority opinion.
The effect of the majority opinion is to award benefits to a person who indisputably falls within the class of persons that Congress intended to benefit. While a review of the record from the claimant’s first application for benefits may call the original denial of benefits into question, established and desirable principles of finality bind us to accept that conclusion. On the claimant’s reapplication for benefits some years later, the objective medical facts demonstrate that his condition worsened, to the point that thé Department of Labor concluded, without difficulty, that the claimant was disabled. The change, defined by the later finding of disability when previously such a finding was not made combined with the finding of a worsened condition, is material. And it is that material change that demands my vote in favor of affirming the Department’s award of benefits, but only from the date of the second benefits application.
I depart from the dissenting opinion where it draws the conclusion, contrary to the law of the case, that the claimant was “unquestionably disabled” at the time of his first application. To reach that conclusion, the dissent engages in an improper review of the first decision denying benefits, a decision the majority has left at rest.
Contrary to the dissent’s suggestion, sympathy — other than for what the law prescribes — played no role in our disposition of this ease.