Court Opinion

ID: 9696612
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:52:44.968374+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:24.236036
License: Public Domain

Dieterich, J.
(dissenting). Although I agree that Robert E. Boos, county auditor of Milwaukee county, has stand*113ing to challenge the validity of the ordinance which increases the salaries, and also the statute purporting to authorize the ordinance, I cannot agree with the manner in which the majority has disposed of the constitutional question of the applicability of sec. 26, art. IV of the Wisconsin constitution to members of the judiciary.
This court has held that the purpose of the constitutional provision prohibiting increase in salary during the term of office is “to protect the public against the evil of letting a public official use his official power and influence to augment his own salary.” State ex rel. Zimmerman v. Dammann (1930), 201 Wis. 84, 96, 228 N. W. 593. If this be true, it is indeed difficult to see how such restrictions may be logically applied to members of the judiciary — a body which is nonpartisan by its very nature, and which is divorced from the political and policy-making spheres of state government.
When the effects of applying such a restriction to the judiciary, as well as to members of the other branches of government, are considered, the results are ludicrous. A state legislator — an official at the very zenith of state policy making — may vote himself a raise in pay during a session, and succeed to the increased salary less than two years later in the case of an assemblyman, and four years in the case of a senator, assuming they are re-elected. Yet members of the judiciary, who play no active part in policy making, are prohibited by the majority’s decision in the instant action from taking any increase in salary whatsoever throughout their entire terms — which are six years for county and circuit judges and ten years for justices of the supreme court.
This court has recognized that the placing of the restriction against salary changes in the article dealing with the legislature (art. IV), rather than in the article on the judiciary (art. VII), creates a sizeable ambiguity as to the application of this restriction to members of the judicial branch of the state government. In State ex rel. Bashford v. Frear *114(1909), 138 Wis. 536, 542, 544, 545, 120 N. W. 216, it was stated that:
“Here [art. VII] we have the office, the term of office, the incident of office, to wit, the salary and the exclusion from every field of official life outside of the judicial field during such term, to wit, the elective term. All that, is in the article especially devoted to the judiciary.
“Turning now to art. IV, devoted to the legislature and its powers, we find that it creates an absolute disability of the lawmaking body to change, in any way, either by increasing or decreasing, any public officer’s compensation ‘during his term of office.’ There is no prohibition in those parts of the constitution dealing with the different classes of state officials or their terms of office on the subject of increase or decrease of compensation, as in the other states to which we have referred. . . .
“. . . If the section which relates to the salary contained a prohibition as to the increase or decrease, as in other state constitutions, there would be less difficulty in reaching a conclusion. ...
“From what has been said, it is quite clear that the meaning of ‘his term of office’ in art. IV of the constitution is far from being free of ambiguity. Even if it were used in an appropriate section in art. VII, dealing with the office of justice of this court, the term of office, and the compensation, it would still be, as an original matter, far from being free from obscurity. That is well illustrated by the decisions of the different courts which have defined it, only by resort to rules for judicial construction. It will be seen by an examination of the decisions . . . that in every one of them the term under discussion, or some similar term, was treated as involving obscurity of meaning.”
The inequity wrought by application of sec. 26, art. IV, to the judiciary is nowhere more obvious than in the present situation of the Wisconsin supreme court. In 1953, the salary of a supreme court justice was $12,000 per year, whereas the present salary (as set by the 1963 legislature) is $24,000. Thus, in the past ten years the legislature has seen *115fit to double the salary, but the elected justices must commit themselves to ten years at the salary in effect when they first come to the bench. The tacit acceptance of sec. 26 as applying to the judiciary has led to the creation of a salary differential of $10,000 per year between the lowest and highest paid associate justices. When the legislature sets a new salary for supreme court justices, it takes a minimum of ten years for all elected members of the court to reach that figure. The rule in the Bashford Case to the effect that an appointee to an unexpired term on the supreme court may take advantage of intervening salary increases between the time the former incumbent took office and the time the appointee takes office, has similarly led to a situation where an appointee may receive $24,000 per year, while the seasoned members of the court receive as little as $14,000. This has the effect of penalizing longevity and tenure — which goes against the grain of contemporary economic conditions, wherein job seniority is recognized as an economic asset in almost all occupations.
The majority opinion cites cases holding that state judges are “officers” within the meaning of sec. 26.1 It thus appears that the applicability of that section to the judiciary is the result of judicial decision, rather than legislative or constitutional mandate. Indeed, sec. 26 was held to be highly ambiguous insofar as its application to the judiciary is concerned in the Bashford Case, and the long-lived acquiescence in such application is also grounded in judicial decision. This court has not hesitated to abrogate judicially made provisions when the changing times have made it evident that such abrogation is necessary. In 1962, we abolished the age-old concept of assumption of risk in host-guest automobile acci*116dent cases because the concepts of the old rule did not appear sufficiently valid under present-day customs. McConville v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. (1962), 15 Wis. (2d) 374, 378, 113 N. W. (2d) 14. Gross negligence incurred the same fate a few months later in Bielski v. Schulze (1962), 16 Wis. (2d) 1, 11, 114 N. W. (2d) 105, wherein we stated that:
“Inherent in the common law is a dynamic principle which allows it to grow and to tailor itself to meet changing needs within the doctrine of store decisis, which, if correctly understood, was not static and did not forever prevent the courts from reversing themselves or from applying principles of common law to new situations as the need arose. If this were not so, we must succumb to a rule that a judge should let others ‘long dead and unaware of the problems of the age in which he lives, do his thinking for him.’ ”
In Holyts v. Milwaukee (1962), 17 Wis. (2d) 26, 30, 115 N. W. (2d) 618, we abolished the rule of sovereign immunity, a doctrine which had its origins in James I’s concept of the divine right of kings, and wound its way up through the English common law into the common law of Wisconsin. The long-standing immunity of charitable corporations from tort liability was similarly abolished because of the changing economy in Kojis v. Doctors Hospital (1961), 12 Wis. (2d) 367, 372, 107 N. W. (2d) 131, 107 N. W. (2d) 292. Wisconsin again departed from the great weight of longstanding authority in this country in Goller v. White (1963 ), 20 Wis. (2d) 402, 122 N. W. (2d) 193, wherein this court abrogated the doctrine of parental immunity in tort cases because it felt that a change was necessary in the interests of justice. In recent years we have also overturned prior interpretations of legislative enactments. See State v. Esser (1962), 16 Wis. (2d) 567, 115 N. W. (2d) 505 (defense of insanity), and State v. Hoyt (1963), 21 Wis. (2d) 284, 124 N. W. (2d) 47 (definition of manslaughter). See also *117Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 347 U. S. 483, 74 Sup. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, the United States supreme court’s historic school-desegregation decision which overturned the age-old “separate but equal” doctrine first announced by that court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 163 U. S. 537, 16 Sup. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256. Mr. Chief Justice WARREN, speaking for a unanimous court in the Brown Case, stated that (p. 492) :
“In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the [Fourteenth] Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.”
It follows that there is nothing standing in the way of a change in the interpretation of the phrase “public officer” as contained in sec. 26, art. IV of the Wisconsin constitution, insofar as its applicability to the Wisconsin judiciary is concerned. There can be no doubt that a judge is a judicial officer, not a public official or public officer.
I am of the opinion that the ambiguity discussed in State ex rel. Bashford v. Frear, supra, should finally be dispelled by a ruling from this court to the effect that the restrictive provisions of sec. 26, art. IV, are inapplicable to members of the judiciary on the ground that they are not “public officers ;” and would therefore overrule all prior cases to the contrary and reverse the judgment of the trial court in the instant action. The economic and social conditions existing at the time our constitution was drafted have long since changed, and, where it is possible, the constitution should be construed liberally, that it may continue as a useful instrument in the life of our society. Doubtful questions ought to be resolved in favor of the freedom of the living generation to govern its own affairs in the light of modern circumstances.
*118While the compensation attaching to a judicial office should not be such as to attract opportunists, when economic conditions reduce its value to the point that qualified men without independent means cannot afford to offer their ser» vices, there must be an adjustment. A reading of the debates of the framers of the Wisconsin constitution reveals that these men believed that in order to secure good and com» petent judges it is necessary to offer sufficient inducement for men of the highest order to assume the responsibilities of judicial office. See Journal of the Constitutional Convention (1848), p. 392. I would reverse the judgment of the trial court.

 Milwaukee County v. Halsey (1912), 149 Wis. 82, 85, 136 N. W. 139. State ex rel. Wickham v. Nygaard (1915), 159 Wis. 396, 401, 150 N. W. 513. Petition of Briedenbach (1934), 214 Wis. 54, 252 N. W. 366.