Court Opinion

ID: 9862122
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 01:01:47.091051+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:30:18.786750
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE MILLER, specially concurring: I join in the judgment of the court. The complicity doctrine is analogous to the former recovery-defeating rules of contributory negligence and assumption of the risk. Accordingly, reassessment of the doctrine may now be appropriate in the wake of the recognition of comparative fault principles by the legislature and by this court. See 735 ILCS 5/2 — 1116 (West 1992); Alvis v. Ribar (1981), 85 Ill. 2d 1; Coney v. J.L.G. Industries, Inc. (1983), 97 Ill. 2d 104; see also Robbins v. McCarthy (Ind. App. 1991), 581 N.E.2d 929; Lee v. Kiku Restaurant (1992), 127 N.J. 170, 603 A.2d 503. The plaintiff, however, has not proposed that we modify or abolish the complicity defense; the dispute before us concerns only the application of the doctrine, in its traditional form, to the facts of this case. In the absence of a request by the parties for reexamination of the complicity doctrine, with full briefing and argument, we should be reluctant to undertake that task. In any event, it may well be that the legislature, and not this court, is the proper body to effect any changes in the doctrine. Complicity, originally a judicial creation, has coexisted with the Dramshop Act for more than a century. (Nelson v. Araiza (1978), 69 Ill. 2d 534, 541-43.) The Act has undergone numerous amendments during that period, yet the legislature has never rejected the doctrine. From this lengthy history we may conclude that the legislature has acquiesced in the court’s construction of the statute, and that the complicity doctrine has by now become part of the fabric of the Dram-shop Act. (See Miller v. Lockett (1983), 98 Ill. 2d 478, 483.) In light of the near statutory status of the complicity doctrine, if further development of the doctrine is to occur, such action is more properly the work of the legislature than of the judiciary. JUSTICE FREEMAN joins in this special concurrence.