Court Opinion

ID: 9663603
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 23:44:38.349504+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:14:53.034856
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(dissenting). Defendant’s motion for summary judgment is unsupported save only by her own summary affidavit. If she is entitled to judgment upon the motion, the following portion of such affidavit—and that only—satisfies the rigorous requirements of Court Rule No 30 (1945):
“4. That defendant at no time promised to pay said hospital bill, orally or in writing, nor was credit extended to her, but to the contrary was extended to her husband.”
Plaintiff responded with an equally conclusionary affidavit, the countering allegation of which reads:
“2. That the aforesaid hospitalization and medical care were not furnished gratis by plaintiff to the defendant; and, the credit therefor was extended by the plaintiff to both the defendant and her husband, John Eisele, jointly and severally.”
Summary justice by summary judgment is extraordinary. It should be restricted to cases where the moving party’s showing, of an outright absence of issues of fact, is so clear as to oust all reasonable doubt upon that score. Here defendant’s affidavit in *691quoted regard is no more than an allegation of mixed fact and law such as one finds in common-law pleadings. It presents no testimonially related facts upon which the trial court might properly have found, as a matter of law, that defendant was a complete stranger, contractually, to the joint and several undertaking plaintiff alleges in its declaration.
This is the rigid intent of the rule. I would adhere to it the better to avoid even the appearance of justice hastened unto “quick justice.” Lawyers and laymen know from hard experience the injustice of delayed justice. They do not yet know, quite so well at least, the injustice of justice mechanized into production schedules by these new-fangled methods of trying cases without trials. The latter may do away —superficially—with the need for more judicial manpower and yet harm the cause of true justice.
This dissent holds no brief for the correspondingly conclusionary affidavit plaintiff filed contra. But that factor extends defendant no aid. Defendant is the moving party and entitled to summary judgment —if at all — solely on the strength of her quoted affidavit; not the weakness of an opponent affidavit.*
I would reverse, offering in explanation of this and like compendiums the apparently unpalatable “prescription” Chief Justice Dethmers wrote last year for appellate judges — himself included. Here is the prescript, headed “Shorter Opinions”:
“With respect to time consumed in preparation of opinions, lawyers will perhaps suggest that judges could afford themselves some relief by producing shorter opinions and sticking, as they should in the *692interests of accurate pronouncements of the' law, to writing succinctly and exclusively on the issue in need of decision, without further gratuitous offerings. Time-of the court is wasted and the door thrown open, to needless error in the development, and exposition of the law, when judges write one. word more than that which is necessary to decide the case. In writing opinions, they must rigorously resist, • as'some of them do not, the temptation to indulge a sense of humor or a taste for general literature. In the current effort to find additional aids and means to facilitate the flow of litigation through the' courts, here is a-‘d.o it yourself’ prescription for the appellate judges.” March issue, 1960, The An-' nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, p 158. . .
Dethmers, C. J., and Kavanagh, J., concurred with Black, J.

 “The burden of establishing the nonexistence of a genuine issue of fact which would warrant the granting of a summary judgment is always on the moving party. If from the facts presented to the court at the hearing on the motion for summary judgment there appears doubt as to whether or not there are controverted issues of material facts, the motion for summary judgment should be denied.” Author’s comment, Honigman’s Michigan Court Rules Annotated, p 301.