Court Opinion

ID: 9571302
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:30:37.836262+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:30:17.300239
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE DOYLE
specially concurring:
I concur in the opinion by Mr. Justice John C. Harrison, however, I view with apprehension the word “additur” becoming a part of the nomenclature of Montana Jurisprudence.
In some of our jurisdictions, not too subtle attempts are being advanced and sponsored to discard the jury system, or permit the court to invade the province of the jury.
These efforts bear very innocuous titles such as “Simplified Procedure for Court Determination of Disputes,” but careful analysis of this “Simplified Procedure” is to take from the jury, who try the facts, and place the final result of the litigation in the hands of one man, the trial judge.
*515The jury is beneficial to the judge for two reasons. First, the facts of the case frequently are a greater problem to decide than the law of the case. Second, it spares the judge from harsh decisions that a sharp application of the law to the actual facts would often require.
The American colonists recited in the Declaration of Independence anent the king, that he was “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.”
There is and should be a sharp line of demarcation between the question of fact for a jury’s decision, and the question of the law of the case which is a judicial duty.
Concurring with Mr. Justice John C. Harrison, I would quote from a French jurist, Alexis de Tocqueville speaking of our jury system who said, “I do not know whether the jury is useful to those who have law suits; but I am certain it is highly beneficial to those who judge them; and I look upon it as one of the most efficacious means for the education of the people which society can employ.”