Court Opinion

ID: 9468427
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:14:31.407531+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:51.813017
License: Public Domain

HARLINGTON WOOD, Jr., Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
This is a close case of statutory interpretation, but I respectfully dissent from the majority’s conclusion that the Act must be so strictly and rigidly read as to exclude coverage of the alleged transmission substitution by General Motors.
Judge Moran, in the trial court, carefully pondered the arguments and concluded that the act was broader than General Motors argued, but not so broad as plaintiffs’ urged.1 I generally agree with his interpretation.
As Judge Moran noted, 500 F.Supp. at 1184, he was not the first one to have some difficulty interpreting the Act. Others before him have characterized it as serving as no exemplar of legislative clarity. I would, therefore, not begin and end by viewing the Act’s definition provisions in such isolation as to conclude that the beneficial consumer protection purposes of the Act are thereby completely limited. Were this a criminal statute, I might be bound to resolve the question in favor of General Motors, but it is not.
This Act needs some limited judicial first aid in order to be able to accomplish its remedial purposes.2 Therefore, I would interpret the Act to mean that those written documents of General Motors which made specific representations of substance about the product, not just advertising ballyhoo, and which were introduced by General Motors into the transaction became, as a practical matter, inferentially incorporated into the written warranty. The written warranty would then more fully deserve its gold filigree frame.

. See United States v. American Trucking Associations, 310 U.S. 534, 543, 60 S.Ct. 1059, 1063, 84 L.Ed. 1345 (1940): “[E]ven when the plain meaning [of the statute] did not produce absurd results but merely an unreasonable one ‘plainly at variance >with the policy of the legislation as a whole’ this Court has followed that purpose, rather than the literal words.” (Footnotes omitted.) For one of the earliest statements of the applicable principles of statutory construction, see Heydon’s Case, 30 Co. 7a, 76 Eng.Rep. 637 (Exchequer 1584): “[F]or the sure and true interpretation of all statutes in general (be they penal or beneficial, restrictive' or enlarging of the common law,) [among the] four things [which] are to be discerned and considered [is]: ... 4th. The true reason of the remedy, and then the office of all the Judges is always to make such construction as shall suppress the mischief [at which the statute is aimed], and advance the remedy, and to suppress subtle inventions and evasions for continuance of the mischief . .. and to add force and life to the cure and remedy, according to the true intent of the makers of the Act....” (Emphasis added.) See generally W. Hurst, Statutes In Court 142, 184-201 (1970).