Court Opinion

ID: 9794027
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:56:53.283767+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:09:39.921339
License: Public Domain

OPALA, Justice,
with whom WILSON, Justice, joins, dissenting from the court’s denial of the request by respondents — Jerry R. Fent and Margaret R. Fent — to stay the effectiveness of this court’s March 20, 1998 opinion which the court refused to rehear by its April 30, 1998 order.
¶ 1 I would grant the respondents’ request and stay the effectiveness of this court’s opinion herein. Militating strongly in favor of the course I would pursue and earnestly counsel today are these considerations:
¶ 2 (1) The opinion approves a bond issue for funding an ambitious highway construction program. So long as certiorari review by the U.S. Supreme Court remains a mere possibility, a serious cloud hangs over the legality of the court-endorsed financing method.
¶3 (2) Both the public and the underwriters would benefit from a stay. If there is indeed a federal-law issue to be resolved — a question that only the U.S. Supreme Court is competent to answer — the obligation to be incurred should not be finalized before the controversy that clouds its validity has been settled.
¶ 4 (3) This court has established a longstanding and proud tradition for staying the enforcement of all of its decisions whose review is sought in the U.S. Supreme Court. My combined forty-year stretch of professional and judicial memory indicates, without a doubt, that in no case has a stay, such as that refused today, ever been denied.
¶ 5 (4) Concerns for the public-law nature of this controversy and due consideration for those among the taxpayers of this State who maintain a negative position vis-a-vis the legitimacy of the court-approved action to be reviewed incline me to counsel a more cautious course than that followed today.