Court Opinion

ID: 9707054
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:59:52.373831+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:37:17.226189
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Me. Justice Musmanno:
If the defendant school district had permitted a Bengal tiger to roam the school yard of the Schenley High School, and the minor plaintiff, Louis Husser, Jr., had been mangled by that savage beast, I cannot believe that the Majority of this Court would say that the defendant would not be guilty of neglect in allowing such a peril to life and limb to exist. The responsibility of holding in leash a raging mob of juvenile delinquents intent on ruinous mischief cannot be less.
The school authorities knew of the criminal tidal wave which from time to time inundated the school property. The newspapers, as well as radio and television news programs, frequently referred to this disgraceful victimization of the small and the weak by the big and the brutal, but the authorities initiated no measures to offer protection to the school children. In consequence, Louis Husser suffered a broken jaw, facial paralysis, disfigurement and serious anatomical breakage.
He comes into court through his father and seeks redress, but this Court summarily disposes of the litigation by saying that never in the past did a school district have to respond in damages for injuries done to children, no matter how negligent the district might be. Not only that, the Majority says, why, just recently in the case of Dillon v. York City School District, 422 Pa. 103, we reiterated our rule that if a child breaks its leg or in any other way is injured because of the averred negligence of a school district, the courts will not listen to any such complaint. The Majority advances this self-stultifying proposition with *253an aplomb that says in effect that the recency of an aggression justifies its continuing repetition.
The Majority advances no rationalization for denying the injured plaintiff in this case a forum. It merely says we never allowed a school child any right to sue a school district, and we do not propose to open the court doors now to such cases.
This injustice cannot endure forever. I am satisfied that the day will arrive, and it cannot be far off, when people will laugh at solemn decisions of the courts of law which declare that everybody is responsible for his civil wrongs at law,-—everybody but the government. What is government, but an institution set up by the people to protect the people? To say that anyone injured by the government cannot sue the government is like saying that a ship built by certain individuals may transport anyone but the builders.
During the third year of my incumbency on this bench I wrote a dissenting opinion against governmental immunity, in which I discussed at length the unfairness, illogicality and unreasonableness of that proposition. In that case, Boorse v. Springfield Twp., 377 Pa. 109, two policemen killed a valuable race horse called All’s Over. They emptied their revolvers into his head, although the horse was in excellent health and was merely temporarily wedged in a culvert from which he could have been extricated easily. The owner of the valuable horse sued Springfield Township, employer of the police, but this Court held that the municipality was immune from liability since it enjoyed sovereign immunity. This Court, then as today, seemed to believe that it is enough to say “sovereign immunity” and all the processes of law and of man’s brain will stop functioning as if in the terrified presence of a charging lion. Briefly, I said in the Springfield Township case: “The theory of governmental immunity for the tortious acts of governmental repre*254sentatives, employes and agents is founded upon the presumption that a sovereign power cannot be adjudged in error, and this idea in turn stems from the meretricious formula that a king can do no wrong . . . [D]e-spite the fact that America discarded kings nearly two centuries ago and that the English monarch is now but an innocuous geniality, the common law deriving from British sovereigns still proclaims that the sovereign power can do no wrong. The time has come to bury this legal charlatanry in the grave of its discredited monarchial grandsires.”
Since I filed that dissenting opinion 13 years ago I have written a number of dissenting opinions against the archaic, unsportsmanlike, reason-defying, bizarre, self-stultifying, monumentally unjust, cruel, brutal, undemocratic piece of pedantical nonsense known as sovereign immunity. A governmental doctrine which compels corporations and natural persons to bind up the wounds of children struck down through the negligence of corporations and persons but which will itself forget the children languishing in the street where they have been felled by governmental irresponsibility is a doctrine that cannot much longer retain the respect of the legal profession, the legislative department of the state and the general public. Thus, I refuse to believe that this additional timber piled by this Court on the back of the patient, suffering camel of the public means that the battle for reason and justice in this Held of the law is, like the life of the poor racehorse of Boorse Township, all over.