Court Opinion

ID: 9623167
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:28:48.870659+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:24.950845
License: Public Domain

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE PRINGLE
dissenting:
I most respectfully dissent. I do not believe that an outworn common law doctrine should be retained in the law of this state in the hope that the legislature will act in that area. Had the legislature acted in whatever way, I would, of course, recognize and adhere to their power in this area. But in the absence of their action in the field, I think it wrong to rely, as I said, on an outmoded common law doctrine. The strength of the common law always was its responsiveness to the changing needs of society.
*349In Evans v. Board of County Commissioners, 174 Colo. 97, 482 P.2d 968 (1971), this court eliminated the doctrine of sovereign immunity in Colorado. The doctrine had been applied throughout 85 years of court decisions. The court, in justifying the decision stated:
“. . . We think that Constitutionality of Substitute and Bish, the two cornerstones of sovereign and governmental immunity in Colorado, were wrong when announced and they are wrong today; repetition of them forty times or four hundred times doesn’t make good law or cause the reasons for the doctrines to become any stronger. In any event, if the doctrines were not wrong when some or all of these decisions were written, they are now.” 482 P.2d 972.
The court stated that one reason for eliminating sovereign immunity was that social and economic and political conditions were greatly different in 1971 than they were in the tinie of the English Tudors. Compare, page 565 of the majority opinion in Blackwell, where the court concedes that the doctrine of caveat emptor was created in a time of different social and economic conditions. See also Javins v. 1st Nat. Realty Corp., 138 U.S. App. D.C. 369, 428 F.2d 1071 (1970).
It has been said by the great Justice Holmes that
“It is revolting to have no better reason for the rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting, if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.” Holmes, Collected Legal Papers, p. 187.
And in Kent’s Commentaries, Lecture XXI (14th ed. 1896) we find the following:
“It is impossible that the fabric of our jurisprudence should not exhibit deep traces of the progress of society, as well as of the footsteps of time.”
The former Chief Justice Frantz, in speaking of this principle, said in his dissent to the majority in Tesone v. School District, 152 Colo. 596, 384 P.2d 82 (1963):
“Thus it has been said that courts may reshape ancient rules of the common law so as to fit them to present conditions; verily, it is their duty to keep the common law abreast of changes wrought by time. Courts should not be averse to molding common law principles to meet the dictates of experience and observation. Indeed, it is a sad commentary on the common law if it can be said of it that it cannot profit by the experiences and observations of the past and that thus the present shall always and irrevocably be controlled by the past.” 384 P.2d at 86.
* * * *
“This doctrine should go the way of other principles of old English law which outlived their usefulness or which became outmoded by reason of change. It should go the way of such principles as compurgation, feoffment, the doctrine that a husband may inflict corporal punishment *350upon his wife ... to mention but a few doctrines that have fallen by the wayside in the evolutionary progress of the common law.
“This Court has said in respect to stare decisis that ‘above and beyond all this is the more important question of being right, and, unless there is some particular reason why an erroneous ruling should be followed, no court should be above reversing itself when it has been clearly demonstrated that it has made a mistake in one of its conclusions * * *; in such case the precedent should not be blindly followed simply because it has been announced.’ Imperial Securities Company v. Morris, 57 Colo. 194, 141 P. 1160.” 384 P.2d at 88.
As the majority opinion in this case indicates, an increasing number of courts have recently adopted the doctrine of implied warranty of habitability. The leading case of Javins, supra, enumerates the compelling reasons for adopting the implied warranty:
“The assumption of landlord-tenant law, derived from feudal property law, that a lease primarily conveyed to the tenant an interest in land may have been reasonable in a rural, agrarian society; it may continue to be reasonable in some leases involving farming or commercial land. In these cases, the value of the lease to the tenant is the land itself. But in the case of the modern apartment dweller, the value of the land is that it gives him a place to live. The city dweller who seeks to lease an apartment on the third floor of a tenement has little interest in the land 30 or 40 feet below, or even in the bare right to possession within the four walls of his apartment. When American city dwellers, both rich and poor, seek ‘shelter’ today, they seek a well known package of goods and services — a package which includes not merely walls and ceilings, but also adequate heat, light and ventilation, serviceable plumbing facilities, secure windows and doors, proper sanitation and proper maintenance.” 428 F.2d at 1074.
The Javins opinion further noted that builders of new homes recently have been held liable to purchasers for improper construction on the ground that an implied warranty of fitness had been breached. See Carpenter v. Donohoe, 154 Colo. 78, 388 P.2d 399 (1964).
In Green v. Superior Court, 10 Cal. 3rd 616, 111 Cal. Rptr. 704, 517 P.2d 1168 (1974), the California Supreme Court wrote at length in discarding, in favor of an implied warranty of habitability, the common law doctrine that a landlord owed no duty to his tenant to keep leased premises in a habitable condition. It pointed out that the doctrine of caveat emptor which applied during free market days no longer served as a .viable means for fairly allocating the duty to repair leased premises between landlord and tenant. The doctrine of caveat emptor has been wiped out in many other areas of the commercial law and an implied warranty of fitness adopted. The common law doctrine of caveat emptor in the landlord tenant field ought to go as well and, unless constrained by legislative act, I would do it.
*351The problems envisioned by the majority opinion seem to be substantially exaggerated. In several recent law review articles dealing with the economic effects of implied warranties of habitability, it has been found that while there has been some abandonment of residential dwelling units by landlords, this abandonment has not been widespread and has not drastically affected the availability of low income housing.
Furthermore, cases and articles have discussed and offered viable methods for determining a tenant’s damages in cases where the implied warranty of habitability has been breached. See Note, An Assessment of the Impact of an Implied Warranty of Habitability in New York State, 24 Buffalo L. Rev. 189 (1974); Moskovitz, The Implied Warranty of Habitability: A New Doctrine Raising New Issues, 62 Calif. L. Rev. 1444 (1974).