Court Opinion

ID: 9623760
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:42:49.33591+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:05:34.655004
License: Public Domain

HUNTLEY, Justice,
dissenting.
The logic of the majority opinion may be summarized by the following syllogism:
First, Union representatives bargained with the employer for health and accident insurance for employees.
Second, employer procures a contract of insurance for that coverage.
Third, on summary judgment, and as a matter of law, the benefits payable under insurance coverage contract is not for the benefit of the employees.
Socrates would have difficulty with modern judicial reasoning.
Were I able to command a majority, the decision would read as does the Appendix set forth infra.
The majority actually misapprehends the record in two respects:
First, in Part II the reader is left with the suggestion that the federal court implied that this was a minor dispute which would ultimately deprive it of jurisdiction even if there were not a lack of diversity. In fact the federal court plainly did not so rule. No court has taken testimony on that issue and yet in Part III the majority now rules without the benefit of any evidence that this claim involves a “minor dispute.”
Second, the majority, in the concluding paragraph of Part I, inserts the spectre that Travelers, if required to defend, would be required to assert defenses to matters which were beyond its knowledge or expertise. The fact is, as demonstrated in the Appendix, the insurance policy incorporates almost verbatim the defenses contained in the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
The majority reaches its result via a demonstrably faulty reasoning process: •
Premise: The insurance policy was procured to fulfill a contract duty of the employer-railroads.
Conclusion: From that premise the majority jumps to the conclusion that the insurance contract cannot be said to be for the benefit of the employees.
*518The fallacy in that reasoning process is evident. It is not the law of third-party beneficiary contracts that a contract between A and B for the mutual benefit of A and B cannot also benefit C. Most contracts are intended to, and do, confer a benefit upon the contracting parties (A & B), but no respectable authority has gone so far as to suggest that such benefits are mutually exclusive to any benefit flowing to a third party (C).
The determination of whether there is a “third party beneficiary contract” or a “minor grievance” is not an appropriate matter for summary judgment ruling and the use of the summary judgment was a clear abuse of that procedure by the trial court. That abuse the majority now embraces and endorses, vastly compounding the mischief by statewide dissemination of incorrect third-party beneficiary contract law.
BISTLINE, J., concurs.