Court Opinion

ID: 9849884
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:48:43.07626+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:20:27.820872
License: Public Domain

Neely, Justice,

concurring:

I concur in the result but strenuously dissent from the Court’s holding that the language of Rule 51 mandates *123that lawyers must object to a trial court’s refusal to give instructions. Lawyers do not offer instructions for the purpose of having them refused; why require superfluous babble to emphasize the inherently obvious, to-wit, that the lawyer believes that the instruction correctly states the law?
Drafters of Rules of Civil Procedure, like everyone else in society including plumbers, doctors, and automobile mechanics, are occasionally inattentive. This was exactly the case when West Virginia almost wholesale adopted rules which were originally designed for the federal system of courts. In the federal system a charge, written by the Court, is used instead of specific instructions, so it makes sense to require a lawyer to “object” to the court’s charge; however, in our system the lawyer moves that an instruction be given and when it is refused, technically the lawyer would “except.”1 The requirement that specific objections be made to the refusal to give offered instructions is but one example of poor choice of language for the West Virginia Rules which leads to an Alice in Wonderland result. In general under Rule 46 a moving or objecting party need not note an exception to the court’s action, an obvious recognition that idle chatter adds nothing to the conduct of a law suit.
The majority’s technical reading of Rule 51 when it is totally uncalled for in light of a contradiction with the clear policy enunciated by Rule 46 adds but one more *124trap for the unwary to the law of this State. If, by the way, in the majority opinion it were planned to consider the instructions anyway by skating around the problem with the “plain error” rule, why did the majority bother to speak to such an unworthy subject at all? Why to add one more mother-may-I to the law so that the unwary will have yet another opportunity to be impaled upon the petard of absurd technical rules! Where would the legal profession be if simple country lawyers during the heat of battle which is a law suit could rely upon inherent logic?
I am authorized to state that Justice Wilson joins in this concurring opinion.

 Some elaboration on the differences between the federal and state systems will illustrate the point in the text. In federal court the trial judge himself composes a charge to the jury, based in part on his understanding of the law and the case and in part on instructions offered by counsel. In this situation a lawyer’s objection to the judge’s failure to include an offered instruction in the charge serves a legitimate purpose. The objection calls the judge’s attention to what may have been merely an inadvertent ommission and gives the judge a chance to set matters right before it is too late. By contrast, the practice in West Virginia is for the trial judge simply to read the proffered instructions to the jury, except for those which he refuses. Any refusal to give a proffered instruction is thus a conscious and deliberate act which hardly needs the added emphasis of a lawyer’s objection.