Court Opinion

ID: 9446322
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:52:15.653029+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:37.037542
License: Public Domain

CHAMBERS, Circuit Judge
(concurring and dissenting).
I concur in the foregoing opinion except with respect to the specification concerning the limiting order on the taking of the depositions of Drs. Hills and Proctor in Baltimore. Their testimony would have concerned the cases of Paul and Verla Martin. In my view we have not been told by any Oregon state decision what we should do on the point. And, usually I am most reluctant not to follow the opinion of a district judge well versed in the law of his own state on a point peculiar to his state.
Here I think we do an injustice when we say to the defendant, “During the course of trial you should have renewed your request to take the doctors’ deposition; that is, have stopped the trial to do it.” Ordinarily, that would be a useless right. With a jury one does not want to stop the main show to run off to a side show in Maryland. That has many perils, not the least of which is the urgency of courts to get on with their business. I would let a plaintiff restrict the taking of testimony on depositions at his own risk, if he should later offer to testify in the restricted area. And, as a trial judge, I would think it plaintiff’s error, not mine.
But assuming I am wrong in my foregoing view, I would suggest that if the same problem should appear again in the same frame, the trial judge might well take the matter in hand and advise the plaintiff at the time of entry of the limiting order that if the plaintiff should appear at trial and by his own act of testifying waive the theretofore protected privilege, he, the trial judge, would grant a mistrial on his own motion. This would give effect to an ascertainable Oregon policy. This would stop a game of ducks and drakes.