Court Opinion

ID: 9696177
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:39:48.569544+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:19.256897
License: Public Domain

*686Levin, J.
(concurring). The plaintiffs have failed to present any evidence that the Legislature used the term “date of injury” in the 1965 amendatory act in a sense different from the meaning ascribed to that term by the Michigan Supreme Court in Grodzicki v. Revere Copper & Brass, Inc. (1934), 268 Mich 143, and Addison v. W. E. Wood Co. (1919), 207 Mich 319, 325. In those cases the Supreme Court construed that term, as used in the Workmen’s Compensation Act, to mean the date of the accident, not the date of the occurrence of a further development of the injury suffered in the accident. See, also, Nieminen v. Isle Royale Copper Co. (1921), 214 Mich 212.
In the light of that decisional law, we could not properly say that the words chosen to reflect the legislative purpose — words of art under the Workmen’s Compensation Act — have a doubtful meaning.
It may be that the Legislature did not focus at all on the atypical further development factual situation when the retroactivity-prospectivity language was written. If there were evidence either in the structure of the act or in the form of legislative history or otherwise to support that supposition or the plaintiff’s claim that the legislative purpose was limited to barring retroactivity in the typical case of temporary total disability, then, indeed, whatever form of words was used in stating the rule of prospectivity in the 1965 amendatory act, the doctrine elucidated in Allen v. Kalamazoo Paraffine Co. (1945), 312 Mich 575, would not have been superseded.
We may not, however, properly substitute a hunch for concrete evidence either that the Legislature did not concern itself with the question or that it intended to ascribe a special meaning in this instance to the term of art “date of injury”.