Court Opinion

ID: 9583306
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:37:28.677769+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:38:56.426733
License: Public Domain

ZIMMERMAN, Chief Justice,
concurring:
I concur in the opinion of Justice Russon. I write only to note that whatever the merits of the position suggested by Justice Durham as an abstract matter, her proposal represents a fundamental shift in the approach we have taken to the question of who is a co-employee under the workers’ compensation statutes. I would leave any such shift to the legislature.
I also note that if we were to adopt the position suggested by Justice Durham, where the legal question of who is a co-employee would be dependent on a fact-intensive balancing determination by a trial court with no single fact being outcome determinative, the result would be to remove virtually all predictability from this area of the law. The effect would be to leave the legal question of who is a co-employee up to each trial judge to decide, subject only to the broadest and most deferential review by the appellate courts. See State v. Pena, 869 P.2d 932, 937-38 (Utah 1994). Different judges would be free to reach different conclusions on similar facts, and an appellate court would have no legitimate basis for finding that any of them necessarily erred. Id. We should be very hesitant to establish such an unpredictable regime in an area of the law that is so central to the operation of the workers’ compensation law and to the structuring of relations between employers and those who perform their work.
HOWE, J., concurs in Chief Justice ZIMMERMAN’S concurring opinion.