Court Opinion

ID: 9628028
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:05:17.369115+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:56.229405
License: Public Domain

Dolliver, J.
(concurring) — I agree with the opinion of the majority. My reason for writing this concurrence is to suggest that the appearance of fairness doctrine has outworn its utility and should be abandoned. Even conceding for the sake of argument that the doctrine may at one time have had some utility, that time is now past. As the major*182ity makes plain, our articulation and application of the doctrine has been neither clear nor consistent. The scope of appearance of fairness has been vague and uncertain. See Chicago, M., St. P. & Pac. R.R. v. State Human Rights Comm'n, 87 Wn.2d 802, 557 P.2d 307 (1976); Fleming v. Tacoma, 81 Wn.2d 292, 502 P.2d 327 (1972). Under the best of circumstances, "appearance of fairness" is a totally subjective standard. A review of our cases since Smith v. Skagit County, 75 Wn.2d 715, 453 P.2d 832 (1969), makes it apparent that our attempts at objective standards have resulted in creating distinctions which give the appearance of being more oriented toward result than fairness.
I agree with the comment of the late Justice Marshall Neill:
My objection is not to the general requirement of, and judicial concentration on, the fairness of the proceedings, but to the emphasis on appearances. ... It requires no legal expertise to know that appearances are often misleading, a danger that is severely aggravated by modern techniques of image-making. There is the further hazard that elevation of "appearance of unfairness" to the status of a legal term of art may come to serve as a cloak for unexplained, ephemeral grounds of decision. For these reasons I believe that emphasis on appearances is a veiled and dangerous practice.
. . . [T]he court has premised judicial decision entirely on matters having no more reality than the shadows in Plato's cave.
Chrobuck v. Snohomish County, 78 Wn.2d 858, 875-76, 480 P.2d 489 (1971) (Neill, J., dissenting).