Court Opinion

ID: 9667370
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:43:56.527025+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:37.381842
License: Public Domain

JONES, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. As a preface to a rather strong expression of my views, a word of admonition may be appropriate. Were the reader to interpret the following remarks as criticism of the author or members of the Court constituting the majority in this case, he would commit grievous, even unforgivable, error. If, on the other hand, these remarks were construed as ridiculing our system of common law pleading, I would agree “with every word at my command.”
In the waning days of common law pleading in this state, the majority opinion has succeeded in proving the system’s ultimate futility and demonstrated irrefutably, it seems to me, the absolute necessity for its long-overdue demise. Look with me, if you will, at the court’s application of the rules of common law pleading to the plaintiff’s complaint.
It states: first, the Georgia law is not well pleaded. This assertion proceeds on on the premise that she must plead the Georgia wrongful death act for the reason that the Alabama wrongful death act has no extraterritorial effect; second, even if pleaded, the statute of limitations averment should have awaited the replication; third, but if such statute were pleaded by replication, this would be an attempt (here unauthorized) to invoke the procedural law of Georgia and not that of Alabama; fourth, the death, not being brought under the death act of Alabama, our two-year wrongful death statute of limitations cannot apply; and, finally (completing the circle), even if the Georgia statute of limitations could have been pleaded properly, it wasn’t; and, consequently, plaintiff is out of court.
Having reached such a pinnacle of hopeless confusion, we can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the burial day for Alabama common law pleading is rapidly approaching. As one last reverent gesture, I propose the following epitaph:
Here lie the remains of a system of pleading,
Conceived at common law — nutured in ages succeeding.
Begot as a servant, it grew to be the master;
May it rest in peace and be forgotten hereafter.
If ever it served the purpose intended,
No one now questions from the way it ended,
Of all man’s attempts to cast it aside,
Death finally came by suicide.
Foolishness aside, look at the result reached by the majority opinion which involves issues beyond mere pleading. A suit is brought in Alabama by an Alabama citizen against Alabama citizens (the foreign corporate defendant having qualified to do business in Alabama) for damages for the death of an Alabama citizen (her son) based on warranty made and breached (allegedly) in Alabama. The only fact connected with this case that occurred outside Alabama is the fact of death in Georgia — an incident of travel, merely.
Under these facts, the court has applied the Alabama omnibus statute of limitations (one year) to bar the action. The one-year statute applied is the only statute of limitations in Alabama or Georgia that has nothing to do with either (1) wrongful death under Georgia law (two years), (2) wrongful death under Alabama law (two years), or (3) breach of warranty under Alabama’s Commercial Code (four years).
The thrust of my dissent can be brought into focus by a consideration of the plaintiff’s plight. If she went to Georgia to sue, she would not be able to obtain service of process on at least one of the defendants and she would be faced with Georgia’s *109interpretation of their UCC which disallows recovery for death based on breach of warranty.
If, instead, she brought her action in Alabama, she must ride the other horn of the same dilemma — our wrongful death statute is not available because her deceased son just happened to be in Georgia when the breach (allegedly) resulted in his death.
Faced with this imperfect choice, she elected the latter; and our wrongful death act’s “non-extraterritorial effect” doctrine caused her to ground her Alabama claim (based on breach of warranty) under the Georgia wrongful death act. Query: Is she by virtue of this fact bound by Georgia’s interpretation of Georgia’s UCC as it relates to Georgia’s wrongful death act? I submit that an affirmative answer to this question produces a strange anomaly. This amounts to saying that we will not give our own death act extraterritorial effect, but where one of our own citizens sues in Alabama on a warranty made and breached in Alabama, and invokes the Georgia wrongful death act to give her standing to pursue her remedy, we will then accord Georgia law extraterritorial effect to test the gravamen of plaintiff’s claim; i. e., whether she can maintain a death action in Alabama based on a warranty that was neither made nor breached in Georgia.
The law of Alabama (in this instance, the UCC) became an integral part of the contract (warranty of merchantability); and I fail to see how the law of Georgia can be applied to, or made a part of, the contract since the Georgia law could not have been within the contemplation of the parties at the time the contract was entered into (time of sale). It is too elementary to support with precedents that the rights and obligations of parties are fixed at the time the contract is entered into. As stated in Goodrich on Conflicts at page 222, the rule is:
“Substantial matters concerning the performance of a contract which bear upon the obligations of the parties and their discharge, pursuant to the conditions imposed by the contract or in sub-situation therefore, are governed by the law of the state most substantially related to the contract.”
By what stretch of the imagination could it be supposed that the law of Georgia had anything to do with the warranty agreement in this case?
To illustrate the utter absurdity of the legal fiction of our “non-extraterritorial effect” doctine, suppose the plaintiff’s son in the case was returning to his military station at Fort Benning, and while crossing the Chattahoochee River Bridge, the steering mechanism of his new car became disengaged and his car plunged into the river, and it was determined that he died by drowning after his body was discovered 20 miles downstream. Plaintiff’s rights (not her right of recovery, mind you, but her right to maintain the suit under Alabama law) would hinge upon a determination of whether her son’s death occurred to the east or to the west of the center line of the channel of the river.
There are only two ways to deal with such a legal fiction: (1) abolish it, and establish in its stead a rule of reality and reason, or (2) create a counter fiction to avoid the harsh result of the first one.
I prefer the former, but in this instance I would indulge the latter since the plaintiff was not given the option to pursue her remedy under our wrongful death act in view of this court’s prior adoption of the “non-extraterritorial effect” doctrine. Having indulged the plaintiff’s right to invoke the Georgia wrongful death act, I would promptly limit its application to provide the remedy merely, i.e., give her a standing to sue for the death of her son.
I would then follow the lead of a series of cases reported and annotated in 95 A.L.R. beginning at page 1162, particularly the reported case of Marshall v. Geo. M. Brewster & Son, 37 N.J. 176, 180 A.2d 129, 95 A.L.R.2d 1153, which held that where the highest court of the situs (Pennsylva*110nia) had determined that its own built-in statute of limitations was strictly procedural, the law of the forum for comparable action (wrongful death) will be looked to in testing the time within which the suit is to be brought. The New Jersey Supreme Court had no difficulty in rejecting the argument, made here by appellees, that where the suit is not brought under the wrongful death act of the forum, then the period of limitation, as prescribed by that act, has no application.
Citing cases from New York and Texas to the same effect, the holding of the New Jersey Supreme Court is summarized in 22 Am.Jur.2d, §§ 282, 803, as follows:
“Since the one-year restriction in the Pennsylvania death act has been construed by the Pennsylvania courts as a procedural bar to the remedy only and not as a condition to the cause of action, an action thereunder filed in New Jersey after expiration of that period may be maintained, where it is filed within the 2-year period set forth in the comparable New Jersey act.” [Emphasis added.]
I would further hold that the gravamen of the plaintiff’s action (wrongful death based on breach of warranty) is not controlled by the law of Georgia; but instead, we should look to our own substantive law. In order to avoid repetition, I adopt the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Faulkner on this point (allowing recovery for breach of warranty) and add the comment: “Right as rain — sound as hickory.”
I submit that the issue in this case ought to be: Did the buyer (plaintiff’s son) die as the result of a breach of warranty on the part of the manufacturer and/or seller? The method (procedure) of raising and presenting this issue is important, and indeed, an indispensable part of the system; but procedure should serve as the handmaid of justice, not as a barrier to that end.
The old adage — “You can’t win for losing”- — may apply in gambling halls and race tracks, but should never be given a field of operation in the halls of justice. More apt is the maxim: “Where there is a wrong, there is a remedy.”
I would hold that the trial judge erred in sustaining the defendants’ demurrer to the warranty count.