Court Opinion

ID: 9588451
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:34:34.223951+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:58.870845
License: Public Domain

Judge Phillips
dissenting.
A written contract that has the defendant’s seal on it is some proof, it seems to me, that the contract is under seal. Plaintiff having produced such a contract, a factual issue was raised, I think, and its case should not have been dismissed on defendant’s word that the seal did not mean what it appeared to. If a seal or any other part of a written contract has no prima facie standing until buttressed by a sworn affirmation that it truly represents or *39expresses the intent of the parties, there would be little or no reason for using written or sealed contracts in the first place.
As to the statute of limitations or statute of repose issue, though the majority opinion is in accord with an unanimous decision of our Supreme Court, I nevertheless respectfully, but firmly, dissent. In my opinion, the General Assembly had no rational basis for immunizing architects and builders against all legal liability just six years after improvements are made to real estate. If G.S. 1-50(5) had been drafted to apply only to improvements that are expected to be used and whose defects usually become manifest within a few years, it perhaps could be rationally defended as being in the public interest. But there can be no possible justification, in my view, for exempting from liability after such a short period the builders and designers of bridges, skyscrapers, dams, factories, coliseums, school buildings, auditoriums, hotels, theaters, and other improvements to real estate that the public has every right to use in safety for much longer periods. While this case involves only a building wall that bulges, other cases, as is obviously foreseeable, will involve more dire consequences to property and human life alike; and to say that the potential producers of such destruction and damage can be absolved of liability even before the damage occurs is to render meaningless, at least to injured and damaged plaintiffs in civil litigation, the equal protection clauses of the federal and state constitutions and Article I, Section 18 of the North Carolina Constitution. This is not a permissible modification or substitution of a civil remedy — such as the Workers’ Compensation Act — which due process under Article I, Section 18 permits in the progress and development of society; it is an abolition of accountability to the public for a special class, in exchange for which no one else in society gets anything whatever. And that some other states have done the same thing alters its character not a whit.