Court Opinion

ID: 9581763
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:18:25.331086+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:37:14.127174
License: Public Domain

Carrico, J.,
dissenting.
I dissent. I do not agree that the labor union involved in this case should be permitted to solicit legal business for its sixteen regional counsel and I cannot believe that the United States Supreme Court ever intended such a result to ensue.
The majority says that it finds a clear expression in the Supreme Court’s opinion which requires it to hold that the union may engage in solicitation. The majority, then, has found something which the writer of that opinion failed to express in plain language and which others have found to be quite an elusive prey. See Comment, The Brotherhood Case, 51 Va. Law Review 1693.
I do not pretend to have any greater powers of clairvoyance than others who have tried to decipher the Supreme Court’s opinion but, to me, all that the court held was that the union had the right to advise injured workers to obtain legal advice and to recommend specific lawyers, and that, in so advising and recommending, the union was not engaged in solicitation.
It is, of course, futile to say that I do not agree even with that holding. I am bound by it. I would not, though, extend the vague language of the opinion one iota beyond that holding.
Admittedly, my construction, as was the chancellor’s, is the narrowest possible construction which may be placed upon the Supreme Court’s opinion. But, in the interest of protecting the ethics of the legal profession, I believe such a construction to be both fully warranted by the opinion and crucially necessary.
The decree of the chancellor respects the union’s recently declared right to advise injured workers to obtain legal advice and to recommend specific lawyers. The decree forbids solicitation. I would affirm the actions of the chancellor in those respects.
*193I would leave it up to the Supreme Court itself to extend its ruling to permit the union to solicit legal business, if that was its intention in the first place. While my powers of prescience are no better than my abilities of clairvoyance, I believe that there is a good chance that the court, if given the opportunity, will say that it had no such intention.