Court Opinion

ID: 9623351
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:31:32.982124+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:28.702869
License: Public Domain

LINDE, «L,
concurring.
In this case and in Rogers v. SAIF, also decided today, the court begins by dealing with the *616problem of review when the decision below could rest on one of several grounds and the Court of Appeals has written no opinion. Workers’ compensation cases are a common but not the only kind of cases in which this question can be decisive of the case and therefore of whether a petition for review should be allowed or even attempted.
As I understand it, the court reads explanations offered by the Court of Appeals in its published opinions and its statement of internal practices to mean that when that court only cites Bowman v. Oregon Transfer Company, 33 Or App 241, 576 P2d 27 (1978), its decision rests solely on its de novo review of the facts, and when it only cites a statute or another prior decision, this signals a decision based on an issue of law which this court may then wish to consider for possible review.
While the use of such citations can be deciphered even by the uninitiated, it leaves in doubt the basis of decision in a case such as the present, which was decided without any citation whatever. This leaves parties contemplating a possible petition for review and this court to speculate whether the decision hinged on a disputed legal question. Moreover, while the bare presence or absence of a citation may convey to specialists in a given field the implication that we draw from it here, cases are not tried or appealed only by specialists. Others need to be able to know whether a petition for review to this court would be a wasted gesture because the decision rests on a factual determination beyond review here, independent of any disputed legal issue. For these reasons it would be helpful, and perhaps not incompatible with the need to forego opinions in purely factual disputes, to indicate by some brief formula beyond the mere omission of a citation that a legal issue raised by the losing party was not material to the decision. The opening and closing sentences of the brief notation in Hoag v. Duraflake, 37 Or App 103, 585 P2d 1149 (1978), cited by the court, shows how short such a formula can be.