Court Opinion

ID: 9675916
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:09:42.027281+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:14:00.843411
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Garwood
dissenting.
The following views were heretofore submitted by the writer in the form of a proposed opinion of the Court and were rejected in favor of the present Court opinion; hence this dissent. It is submitted that the Court has, for motives of greater simplicity, mistakenly applied the law, leaving it actually more complicated than before.
The Thibodeaux case and others mentioned in the Court’s opinion say flatly that the employer is entitled to an unconditional submission of his defense of partial incapacity, even as other decisions hold with reference to the defense of temporary disability. Here the insurer pleaded the former defense and supported its plea with evidence. By objection to the charge and by tendering an unconditional issue on partial incapacity, it squarely presented its contention to the trial court and was overruled. The claimant had a judgment for total and permanent disability compensation, but the insurer got no unconditional submission of its defense. Yet it is said that the Thibodeaux line of cases is not overruled. And despite this latter assertion, is is further insisted that the Rules of Civil Procedure have made a great change since the Thibodeaux case, the present decision being one by way of progress toward simplicity and speed in this kind of litigation.
Now I think this is more confusing than simply to overrule the Thibodeaux line of decisions and say clearly what counsel for the claimant here mainly argued for, to wit, that, for reasons of logic and simplicity, we have done away with submitting as defenses the contrary of the main issues submitted for the claimant. Thus, where there is submitted, “Is the disability total?” we would not also submit for the defendant, unless conditionally upon the answer to the “total” issue, “Is the disability partial?” As stated, the insurer here got no independent *27submission of his defense of “partial,” which the Thibodeaux line of cases says it was entitled to, and the only difference between the present case and the others is that in the latter the issue, “Is the disability total?” was first submitted, whereas here it was not (for the reason that the claimant was admittedly disabled totally at the time of the trial). This difference seems at best but a thin distinction and at worst scarcely a difference. The disability at the moment of trial is no more important than that of a moment before, or a month before, or a week after, the trial. And yet the court’s judgment must rest on this one difference if the Thibodeaux line of cases is not in fact overruled, because that difference is the only one that actually exists. Let us assume the old decisions to stand. The fact is that in numberless compensation cases there is at least some period of admitted total disability following the accident but before the trial. Doubtless this was so even in the Thibodeaux case. In those instances we will surely not submit (along the lines of the present case) “Is the heretofore total disability permanent or temporary?” So we will, perforce, continue to allow independent, unconditional submission of the defense of “partial,” as in the Thibodeaux case, except where the disability is total at the time of trial. I submit that this is the result, if we are not overruling the Thibodeaux case, and that to allow the independent submission of “partial” in the one instance, while denying it in the other, is to add just one more fine (and unprofitable) distinction to an already overintricate area of procedure. On the other hand to overrule clearly the Thibodeaux line of decisions will at least not add confusion, and, as I am not loath to admit, may serve some little purpose of logic and simplicity.
But I still stand on my original view that if the law under the existing decisions now seems too “technical” to us or perhaps even uncomplimentary to the jury’s intelligence, a far better avenue of change lies in frank major surgery under the more or less legislative process of the Rules than in the old-fashioned “nibble away” process of decision. The latter may be an accepted judicial “face saver,” but it certainly contributes more to that end than it does to clarity.
But, after all, logic and simplicity are by no means the mainspring of the law, nor did or could the Rules of Civil Procedure make it otherwise. Law is mainly policy. For example, there is no greater motive of logic or clarity behind our practice of special verdicts. The latter, if we are frank about it, is in large part a policy recognition of the natural weaknesses of twelve average laymen as a tribunal of justice. And who knows but *28what similar policy reasons lie behind our long established practice of making “affirmative” defenses out of many things besides the classical examples thereof, such as accord and satisfaction or limitations, and accordingly allowing defendants their unconditional submission of issues that are essentially but the contrary of the plaintiff’s issues? Not for nothing was it that in this very case we heard counsel for the claimant arguing powerfully for greater logic and simplicity, while counsel for the insurer exalted stare decisis and the old order.
Nothing in Rule 277 or elsewhere in the Rules of Civil Procedure comes near compelling the conclusion reached by the Court. The cautious permission to “submit in one question whether the injured employee was permanently or only temporarily disabled” (note the not altogether logical “only”!) or a corresponding question of “totally or only partially disabled,” is certainly no suggestion, in the present case, to combine both total-partial and permanent-temporary in one allegedly controlling issue and with that excuse to deny the insurer his erstwhile unconditional submission of “partial.” To say that the issue submitted is the controlling issue simply assumes the Court’s side of the very matter in dispute. Why did we not say in the Thibodeaux case that the submission of “total” vel non was the controlling issue and thus overrule the insurer’s demand for independent submission of “partial?” And since the only difference from the cited case is that here the claimant happened to be still entirely disabled at the time of trial, are we hereafter to say, in the many similar cases to arise, that the controlling issue is “Is the total disability which the claimant admittedly suffered last week permanent or only temporary?”
And where does the “new look” lead us as a precedent of more general application? Not for nothing did the old bogey of “Inevitable Accident” crop out in the argument. If we admit to overruling the Thibodeaux case on grounds of logic, will not the same logic require us to decide that an independent submission of “Inevitable Accident” is no longer the defendant’s right? I think so, although we have thus far studiously refrained from taking that step by judicial decision. If we are to be logical, why not be consistently so? Why stop even with “Inevitable Accident,” unless for reasons of policy?
The Court observes that the submitted issue of whether the admitted “total” was “permanent or temporary” was doubtless quite clear to the jury in its implications. That, too, assumes the very conclusion in dispute. No doubt most judges would *29understand that they were really deciding whether a presently totally disabled man was totally disabled for the purposes of an award and totally disabled for good or only for a time. But I suggest that to a judge the effect of the ‘“total” submission in the Thibodeaux case would equally clearly have included a finding on whether the disability was partial. The whole policy background of special verdicts is that judges or lawyers look at and understand things quite differently than does a jury.
It is said, too, that the defense of “partial” is no defense to “total-permanent.” What then was the insurer to do here? Should he have asked an issue combining “partial and temporary” or “partial or temporary” or requested separate issues on “partial” and “temporary” or by what other refined technique should it have poceeded? Conceivably it might have injected the word “duplicitous” into its objection to the first issue of the actual charge, but that issue probably was not duplicitous, since the claimant was totally disabled at the time. It simply was worded so as to deprive the insurer of its traditional right of independent submission of “partial” by giving an appearance of submitting “total or partial” in the alternative form of Rule 277 and at the same time an- appearance of an issue on “permanent or temporary.” If there be any valid reason for the Thibodeaux rule in the first place, Issue No. 1 as submitted did not cut off the right to independent submission of “partial” for the insurer. In fact an answer to the “total” issue in the Thibodeaux case more clearly included a finding on “partial” than did an answer to Issue No. 1 in the instant case. If we apply the Rules to put too great a burden on the lawyers about the precise character of their objections to charges, we are likely to make the Rules more a source of than a refuge from “technicalities.”
Since I think the cited authorities cannot validly be distinguished and ought not be overruled, unless through amendment of the Rules, I believe the judgment of the Court of Civil Appeals was right in the instant case and should have been affirmed.
Opinion delivered November 10, 1954.