Court Opinion

ID: 9718538
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:26:53.206461+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:00.267166
License: Public Domain

HARRIS, Justice
(dissenting).
Respectfully, and with a certain amount of reluctance, I am compelled to dissent. The majority reaches a desirable result after listing convincing reasons why the legislature should have made chapter 411 remedies exclusive. However the matters the majority list as indications of legislative intent seem to me to indicate merely that the legislature was not thinking about the question in this case.
I believe the absence of an exclusiveness provision for chapter 411 was the result of oversight. In all likelihood the legislature would have supplied an exclusiveness statute had one been proposed. But the legislature made no such provision when tort immunity for political subdivision was eliminated, although, as the majority points out, it did provide worker’s compensation remedies are to be exclusive. § 613A.4(4). Under a familiar rule of statutory construction, the express mention of exclusiveness for worker’s compensation benefits implies exclusion of those remedies not mentioned. Inclusio unius est exclusio alterius. In re Estate of Wilson, 202 N.W.2d 41, 44 (Iowa 1972) and authorities.
Under rule 14(f)(13), Rules of Appellate Procedure: “In construing statutes the court searches for the legislative intent as shown by what the legislature said, rather than what it should or might have said.”
We should not supply the statute the legislature omitted.
I would affirm.