Court Opinion

ID: 9599426
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:18:37.677284+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:45.134905
License: Public Domain

PARKER, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
The holding in this case seems to rest entirely on the philosophical leanings of the court and the suggestion that there are somehow inequities which arise from the payment for insurance coverage unless despite a defense of governmental immunity the insurer is required to pay.1 Such rea*1345sons are untenable and insufficient to justify the reversal of decided cases of this court: Maffei v. Incorporated Town of Kemmerer, 80 Wyo. 33, 338 P.2d 808, rehearing denied 340 P.2d 759; Davis v. Board of County Commissioners of County of Carbon, Wyo., 495 P.2d 21, in disregard of stare decisis.
In recent years the legislature has undertaken to deal piecemeal with certain aspects of governmental immunity and that body rather than the court should resolve the problem since the subject is within the prerogative of the electorate. Additionally, any application of a change would be both prospective and definite.
The present decision will leave us in a state of chaos; it covertly suggests that governmental immunity is vulnerable and then takes another bite by holding such immunity is waived by the insured. Under this decision, no one in governmental capacity can have any reasonable assurance as to the extent of his organization’s liability or even his own. Each will be faced with the possibility that the courts may at any time abolish governmental immunity. What they do to protect themselves from this contingency is now used against them by calling it a “waiver.”
The equities of the situation are totally against the position taken in the majority opinion. Many persons engaged in governmental work, particularly those associated with hospitals, schools, and the like, serve gratuituously or for the smallest remunerations. Being uncertain of what the courts might do, they have procured insurance in the hopes that they can in some way avoid liability to their organizations and perhaps to themselves. Instead the opposite results. Their purchase of insurance, the only way they knew to protect themselves, is used as an excuse to hold them liable. Is this not the greatest of inequities ?
If this court has an irresistible urge to clean the “Aegean stable” let it once and for all do so forthrightly and not by innuendo.

. T.o say that no detriment may arise if recovery is limited to the extent of the coverage is to overlook the increase in insurance rates which must result from the holding in this case.