Court Opinion

ID: 9685914
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 15:08:23.956615+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:11.321273
License: Public Domain

SOMERVILLE, Justice
(concurring specially).
I agree that the appellant, George D. Crossett, was a resident of his parents’ household at the time of the altercation with his classmate and hence I concur in the result reached in the foregoing opinion of Justice Bloodworth. However, I feel that our holding here is inconsistent with our decision in Hanna, supra, and that our present decision should expressly overrule Hanna. I take no issue with the well entrenched rule that where provisions of an insurance policy are susceptible of plural constructions, consistent with the object of the obligation, that construction should be adopted which is favorable to the insured. Also, I agree that the word “residents” in the appellee’s policy in the instant case has no precise inflexible meaning applicable to all situations and is correctly construed here. But in Hanna we held that a college student living in a dormitory at Howard College in Birmingham was not “residing in the household” of his father at Tallassee and we thereby removed the ambiguity of that phrase and gave it a definite meaning as applied to the facts in that case. Now, in a similar factual situation, we hold that a college student (Crossett) while living in a dormitory at Auburn University was a “resident of the household” of his father in Birmingham.
My point is that the same phrase (or a phrase acknowledged to be substantially the same) when applied to a similar or a substantially similar situation, should not be held to mean one thing on one occasion and the opposite thing on another. Having, by construction in Hanna, removed any ambiguity as to the meaning of the phrase “residing in the household” when applied to a college student temporarily living away from his-parents, consistency should require that we either continue that construction or, as I urge, overrule Hanna.