Court Opinion

ID: 9575713
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:16:09.271665+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:49:49.995815
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring). This is another case, like recent Burns and Harris,1 where one who claims under a long standing statute would have us rewrite that statute so that it provide for him exactly what this Court, 30 years ago and consistently since, has *382said 'unanimously it does not provide. So comes to public assay tbe solemnly recorded and wholly united word of this Court, given repeatedly upon ■oath to lawyers, legislators, and judges, that this ■statutory proviso of 1927 spells out 2 kinds rather than 1 kind of defense against payment of double compensation to illegally employed minors.
That the Court erred on the 3 interpretive occasions in question (Boshaw v. J. J. Newberry Co., 259 Mich 333 [83 ALR 412], decided in 1932; Blanton v. Clay Products Co., 310 Mich 635, decided in 1945; and Walker v. Ridley Cleaners, Inc., 311 Mich 4, also decided in 1945), is something more than manifest. Justice Souris agrees, discreetly diplomatique, and Chief Justice Carr warily undertakes no denial. The error actually glares through print at the dumfoundecl reader. When in 1927 the legislature said double compensation should be paid “in the absence of fraudulent use of permits or certificates of age,” its inevasible reference was to the fraudulent use of that body’s previous and exclusive creations, the ■statutory working permit and the statutory certificate of age. The reference could not have been to anything else conceivable. If any Brother cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.
Now for a fact and blunt comment. In Boshaw, Blanton, and Walker, and now in these corresponding cases of Halfacre and Keller, 2 there was no fraudulent use of a permit or certificate of age. No •such document existed or was claimed in defense of any one of the 5 cases. In Boshaw the Court just hauled off and enacted an amendment of the statute providing that fraudulent misrepresentation of age, in addition to “fraudulent use of permits or certificates of age,” be and become a pleadable and provable bar to what otherwise would be payable, that is, *383double compensation. The legislature in judicial view had failed to provide fully convenient defenses for employers and insurers of employers. Why should the employment offices of Michigan be bothered with compulsive insistence on production of a birth certificate or working permit every time a youthful or apparently youthful applicant for work shows up at the employment wicket? And was it not deemedly necessary that each employer, even though guilty of having illegally employed at hazardous work a compensably injured minor, should receive protection from common-law fraud on the part of such minor; not just fraud consisting of deceptive “use” of a work permit or certificate of age? Thus was the proviso judicially rewritten so that it include the added words, “and also in the absence of fraudulent misrepresentation of age,” and thus did the court legislate. Such judicial legislation was quite all right, of course, its beneficence having been aimed in the “right” direction.
All this is concededly inelegant. Bluntness is indicated, nonetheless. Once in awhile, judges being mere men and men fortunately being different, patience with words penned of delicate quill dipped in judicially scented ink wears out in favor of curt exposition. It is better, as I conceive, that our membership face today’s problem with open confession that the Supreme Court of Michigan both erred and legislated when Boshaw, Blanton, and Walker were handed down, one after the other, commencing in 1932.
A final comment upon the Boshaw Case. The brief for the claimant minor was written by then Attorney Clifford O’Sullivan of Port Huron, now a distinguished member of the bench of the 6th circuit court of appeals of the United States. Of the question then before this Court Judge O’Sullivan said (brief pages 6, 7):
*384“We think it clearly to have been the intention of the legislature to require an employer to obtain a certificate of some official as to the minor’s age, so that the-employer would not be dependent upon the child’s own statement.”
No one then or since, including the writer of the Boshaiu opinion, has assumed to deny the accuracy of these words. Ignoring them, the Court turned instead to the common law and, quite without authority excepting that of naked power, wrote into the statute what was not there, the defense that “Her fraud must be held to estop her from profiting thereby” (Boshaw at 340). Thus was the child protective policy of the statute frustrated, and thus were employers and insurers given an easy means of outright avoidance of statutory payment of double compensation in cases of illegal employment of minors.
The above confessed, comes the real question: Whether today’s temporally seated Court should undertake to overrule what the legislature has expressly as well as impliedly accepted by no less than 8 successive re-enactments3 of this selfsame — and Ros7mc-interpreted — legislative stipulation for payment of single rather than double compensation.
My Brother Souris’ proposal to overrule is too rashly impetuous for me. ' After all, the doctrine of legislative reliance upon and acceptance of judicial interpretation has its value and its place. Moreover, there is present today one only of those “cogent circumstances” which, in Sheppard v. Michigan National Bank, 348 Mich 577, 596-603, and Park v. Employment Security Commission, 355 Mich 103, 138-140, 141-151, led this Court to overrule previous interpretative decisions. In today’s instance, unless we are to ignore a constantly employed axiom (that the *385legislature enacts with the Court’s interpretational decisions in one hand as it writes and votes with the other),4 we have here most of the more or less conclusive reasons why the doctrine of legislative acceptance should be applied. When a legislature, confronted constantly with unanimous interpretations like Boshaw and its progeny, deliberately re-enacts without change such an interpreted statutory proviso, and does so 8 times running over a period of 30 years, it seems to me that any judge who fails to apply the mentioned doctrine wittingly or unwittingly violates the law (see Cardozo, Nature of the Judicial Process, p 129). I at least want no part of a motion to overrule what indeed was bad law but now is anchored in a regularly readopted statutory provision.
My Brother says that Sheppard and Park (each being an instance where a previous interpretation or interpretations were overruled) provide views which reflect his own.5 I agree with his references, yet suggest that neither for reasons of fact makes for present overruling.
Taking Sheppard first: Since I had a part in the preparation of the particular Sheppard opinion to which Justice Souris refers (especially the portion presently quoted), let it be noted that Sheppard involved again (see Dyer v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 350 Mich 92) the chronic disease of judicial Michigan; 2 *386parallel lines of interpretive decisions, each in utter conflict with the other and each haughtily ignoring such other as the Court picked and chose its precedential^ erratic course from term to term. Justice Talbot Smith, writing in Sheppard, showed why the doctrine of legislative acceptance could not be applied to Sheppard, and why it can be applied here (pp 601, 602):
“Let us attempt, however, to apply the approval-by-silence doctrine to the precise situation before us. That is to say, let us assume that the silence of the legislature may, despite its ambiguity, be taken as an ‘intent to adopt such (i.e., the antecedent judicial) construction.’ Let us, in fact, assume that the legislature, by formal and appropriate action, has so informed us. Where are we now?
“The answer is that we are still in the wilderness of doubt and confusion. The fact of the matter is that prior judicial authority may be found in this jurisdiction on many inconsistent propositions in compensation law. Does the legislature intend to adopt the earlier cases decided by this Court or the later ? Does it intend to adopt the cases saying yes or the cases saying* no ? * * *
“The opinions submitted this date do not tell us. It is unnecessary to more than remind the bench and bar that the asserted doctrine of legislative adoption of judicial interpretations by either silence or, in fact, re-enactment, whatever the merits of the doctrine, can never be applied where the decisions themselves are in turmoil and conflict. This is a proposition to which we shall not cite authority.”
With respect to this case of Halfacre there are no previous decisions “in turmoil and conflict.” Instead there are 3 unanimous decisions, upon continued strength of which the legislature presumably has legislated 8 times. Thus and today there is affirmatively more than legislative “silence.” There is frequent legislative action taken in presumptive *387reliance upon judicial advices long since given with never a dissenting judicial voice. I repeat; never a dissenting judicial voice until these cases of Halfacre and Keller came along.
As for the Park Case it need only be said, as was said at the time, that the single earlier decision (Chrysler Corp. v. Smith, 297 Mich 438 [135 ALR 900]) was the subject of “sharp and unerring dissent.” It literally forewarned the legislature that when the question came up again it would be due for something more than cozy reaffirmation. The divisive Chrysler Case actually remained in chancery, to engage the sporting phrase, until it arrived for re-examination by a court which of necessity was concerned with the need for unitary national construction of like statutes enacted (by most of the States) as a “part of the legislative scheme for unemployment compensation induced by the provisions of the social security act of 1935” (see footnote 2, p 145, Unemployment Compensation Commission of Alaska v. Aragon, 329 US 143 [67 S Ct 245, 91 L ed 136]). Here we are confronted by 3 — not just 1— unanimous decisions, all matured and fitted to each other, which under the rule of Department of Conservation v. Connor6 bid us accept gracefully what the legislature has accepted.
If Boshaw alone stood before us, divisive or otherwise, we then might avail ourselves of the principle that “one decision construing an act does not approach the dignity of a well settled interpretation”' (United States v. Raynor, 302 US 540, 552 [58 S Ct 353, 82 L ed 413]; quoted and followed in White v. Winchester Country Club, 315 US 32, 40 [62 S Ct 425, 86 L ed 619]). Such, however, is not todays case. Boshaw, Blanton, and Walker, standing-unitedly, constitute “the dignity of a well-settled in*388terpretation” even though all were patently wrong when written, and there we find the difference between the situation faced in Parle and that which faces us now. One clearly erroneous interpretation of a statute, attested over unanswerable dissent, has little value as presumptive proof of legislative acceptance thereof. It carries its own flag of independability. Three unanimous decisions however, supporting each other solidly and seemingly accepted for many years by an acquiescent legislature, are quite beyond judicial repudiation when they involve statutes rather than the common law.
As for Justice Souris’ quotation of Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 US 426, 431 (75 S Ct 473, 99 L ed 483), it seems to me that he has stopped reading too soon. Here are the next 2 sentences, immediately following that which our Brother has taken from the Glenshaw Case (pp 431, 432):
“Moreover, the commissioner promptly published his nonacquiescence in this portion of the Highland Farms holding 7 and has, before and since, consistently maintained the position that these receipts are taxable. It therefore cannot be said with certitude that congress intended to carve an exception out of section 22(a)’s pervasive coverage.”
One might add that the Highland Farms holding, said to have been “accepted” by congress, was a mere decision by the board of tax appeals; not an interpretation by the United States supreme court. And it was just 1 “prior” decision; not 3 in line released by the solely authoritative court of last resort.
To conclude: We are bound by our own rules of statutory construction, doubtful though they may be in many instances of application. “Where the *389language used has been subject to judicial interpretation, the legislature is presumed to have used particular words in the sense in which they have been interpreted.” (People v. Powell, 280 Mich 699, 703 [111 ALR 721]; followed expressly in Jeruzal v. Wayne County Drain Commissioner, 350 Mich 527, 534.) “Laws are assumed to be enacted by the legislative body with some knowledge of and regard to existing laws upon the same subject and decisions by the court of last resort in reference to them.” (Lenawee County Gas & Electric Co. v. City of Adrian, 209 Mich 52, 64 [10 ALR 1328].) And see Department of Conservation v. Connor, 321 Mich 648, 652:
“The statute here involved having been enacted after the above decisions, it must be held that by adopting the language of the former statute the legislature adopted this Court’s previous construction thereof. Lenawee County Gas & Electric Co. v. City of Adrian, 209 Mich 52 (10 ALR 1328); People, ex rel. Simmons, v. Township of Munising, 213 Mich 629; People v. Powell, 280 Mich 699 (111 ALR 721).”
The reason is that we have no better — no alternately available — means of fitting that nebulous thing known as legislative intent to the variety of contentious circumstances which come regularly before the courts. Admittedly, the presumptions by which we pluck such intent from words and events are quite figmental. They are there nevertheless, and we are granted no warrant of disregard thereof when some settled interpretation we do not like comes before us.
Supplement — December 3d: .
The appeal board below, understandably mischievous, granted double compensation to Daniel Half-acre (young, single and without dependents) and denied double compensation to Peggy Keller (a *390young mother of a 6-month-old child). Now, should we divide equally, the result would be double compensation for Halfacre and single for Keller.
Such a result, left to stand, would make jesting-stock of any court of last resort. Not liking such result, I cast my vote to affirm Halfacre and to reverse Keller. If Daniel Half acre is to receive double compensation, then so should Peggy Keller say I. Doing so, I do not depart from the interpretational convictions expressed above. Such will be useful for future reference.

 Burns v. Van Laan, 367 Mich 485. Harris v. City of Detroit, 367 Mich 526.

 Keller v. Fraser Stamping Company, 368 Mich 397. — Reporter.

 PA. 193-7, No 204-;- PA- 1939, No 107; PA 1942 (1st Ex Sess), No-6;' PÁ' 1943, No 245; PA 1949, No 284; PA 1952, No 77; PA 1953, No 53; and PA 1955, No 122.

 I concede that this fiction of a part-time legislature, reviewing with profound care judicial decisions relating to a welter of bills each member must vote upon as he hurries each May toward adjournment and the hustings at home, is difficult if not impossible of digestion for all but judges. But digest we must lest rules of evidence and of statutory construction become whimsically dangerous playthings, to be picked up or cast aside at personal will. That was unabashedly done, by the way, when Wallace v. Tripp, 358 Mich 668, was handed down.

 He refers in the same vein to Parker v. Port Huron Hospital, 361 Mich 1, a case which dealt with a rule of the common law rather than a question of statutory interpretation. I lay Parker aside for that reason.

 321 Mich 648, presently quoted.

 Highland Farms Corporation v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 42 US BTA 1314. — Reporter.