Court Opinion

ID: 9519651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:21:23.887277+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:35.024379
License: Public Domain

T. E. Brennan, C. J.
(dissenting). The function of the workmen’s compensation act is to place the financial burden of industrial injuries upon the industries themselves, and spread that cost ultimately among the consumers.
This humane legislation was developed because the industrialization of our civilization had left in its wake a trail of broken bodies.
Employers were absolved from general liability for negligence, in exchange for the imposition of more certain liability under the act.
But it is a mistake to say that employers were absolved from fault. Liability is the basis of legal remedy. Fault is the basis of moral responsibility.
The workmen’s compensation law is society’s expression of the moral responsibility of employers and consumers to the workmen whose health and whose lives are sacrificed to industrial and commercial progress and production.
Fault is not the same thing as proximate cause. The compensation law does not use the word cause. Rather, it expresses the concept of employer and consumer responsibility in the phrase “arising out of and in the course of” the employment.
The terms “arising out of” and “in the course of” are not redundant. They mean two different things. An adulterous cobbler shot at his last by his jealous wife may be “in the course of” his employment.
*250But the injury does not “arise out of” his job. On what basis of moral responsibility should his injuries be paid for by his employer? By what logic would society decree that his disability should add a farthing to the price of shoes?
The workmen’s compensation law is not a utopian attempt to put a price tag on all human suffering and incorporate it into the cost of living.
Lightning, flood, tornadoes and estranged wives will always be with us, in this vale of tears. They were the occasion of human injury when our forebears were tilling the soil with sharp sticks. They are not a by-product of the industrial revolution, nor are they in any sense the moral responsibility of those who profit by, or enjoy the fruits of, our modern industrialized society.
I would reverse without apology for the precedents.
Dethmers and Kelly, JJ., concurred with T. E. Brennan, C. J.