Court Opinion

ID: 9544271
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:53:49.701605+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:12:32.548945
License: Public Domain

McKUSICK, Chief Justice,
with whom NICHOLS, Justice, joins,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I fully concur with the court’s answers to questions 1 and 2. My nonconcurrence relates exclusively to the court’s answer to the third question certified by the United States District Court. The 1973 Legislature enacted 14 M.R.S.A. § 2211 effective October 3, 1973, to impose upon manufacturers and other sellers of products a strict liability in addition to the common law tort of negligence. The third certified question requires us to determine, in the particular set of circumstances presented by the cases at bar, the intent of the 1973 Legislature as to the temporal application of section 221. Specifically, we are asked whether the 1973 Legislature intended that the new statutory tort of strict liability was to apply to the category of fact circumstances represented by the Bernier and Clark cases, namely, cases where both the sale and the harm-causing impact upon the users occurred prior to October 3, 1973. My answer to that question is simply no.
I.
True to established principles of statutory interpretation, we can determine the 1973 legislative intent only by a conventional analysis applied directly to all available materials that are relevant to construing section 221 in the particular factual circumstances here presented. Our task in analyzing the scanty expressions of intent is to select an interpretation that we can say “with reasonable confidence [is] the most plausible alternative on the basis of the text and proper context.” R. Dickerson, The Interpretation and Application of Statutes 221 (1975). That analysis shows, to at least a level of reasonable confidence, that the most plausible interpretation of the 1973 legislative intent dictates a negative answer to question 3. The 1973 Legislature meant that, in cases where the harm-causing impact had already occurred before it enacted the strict liability statute, the *545rights and liabilities of the parties would continue to be governed solely by the common law rules of negligence.
Any statutory analysis must start with the text being interpreted, in this case P.L. 1973, ch. 466 (see n. 1 above). See Perry v. Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., 481 A.2d 133, 138 (Me.1984). Chapter 466 expressly contained only a partial rule of temporal wow applicability; in its second section it provided that section 221 “shall not be construed to affect any cause of action arising prior to [its] effective date....” (Emphasis added) On the facts involved in Adams v. Buffalo Forge Co., 443 A,2d 932, 942 (Me.1982) (post-1973 harm-causing impact), we found that provision of little help because, drafted in negative form, it does not provide a statement of the actions to which section 221 does apply. Nonetheless, the 1973 Legislature’s explicit restriction on section 221’s application does serve to reinforce “the fundamental rule of statutory construction strictly followed by this Court that all statutes will be considered to have a prospective operation only, unless the legislative intent to the contrary is clearly expressed or necessarily implied from the language used.” Miller v. Fallon, 134 Me. 145, 148, 183 A. 416, 417 (1936). See also Terry v. St. Regis Paper Co., 459 A.2d 1106, 1109 (Me.1983) (“the Legislature [must] express its intent to apply a statute retroactively in ‘strong, clear and imperative language’ ”) (quoting Barrett v. Herbert Engineering, Inc., 371 A.2d 633, 635 n. 1 (Me.1977)). That explicit restriction expressed in negative form shows the 1973 Legislature’s sensitivity to the unfairness of imposing a new or additional liability on the basis of past events upon someone who cannot do anything to avoid or mitigate that liability. Nothing in section 221, or in P.L. 1973, ch. 466 that enacted it, affirmatively directs by either clear expression or necessary implication that the strict liability newly created by statute should apply in the Bemier-Clark situation. That fact in itself is enough to require a negative answer to question 3.
In any event, there are additional reasons to believe that the 1973 Legislature did not intend section 221 to apply to the Bemier-Clark factual circumstances. The negative restriction imposed by section 2 of the 1973 enacting statute (see n. 1 above) upon the scope of section 221 fits closely the fact situation represented by the cases at bar. Such was not true in Adams. There we pointed out that on the Adams facts no section 221 cause of action had arisen prior to the 1973 date because both the use of the unreasonably dangerous drill press by the plaintiff and his coincident injury did not occur until 1979. The plaintiff user obviously had no possible cause of action on account of the offending drill press until that time because before then no “physical harm [had been] thereby caused to a person,” the second requirement of section 221. In contrast, in the cases at bar the offending asbestos products sold by defendant Raymark Industries, Inc. had had their full and only harm-causing impact upon Mr. Bernier and Mr. Clark well before October 3, 1973 — indeed about 30 years earlier for Mr. Bernier. No matter whether by October 3, 1973, objective symptoms of those asbestos-caused injuries had appeared, or whether by then the cause of those symptoms had been diagnosed, we now know as an unfortunate but irreversible fact that Mr. Bernier and Mr. Clark had suffered, during the period of time they inhaled asbestos dust, harm to their bodies that led to their disease and death. Regardless whether a court might declare that technically the Bemier-Clark cause of action did not arise at the time of the harm-causing impact, section 2 provides powerful evidence of a legislative distaste for imposing its new, enlarged strict liability upon a set of critical facts that as to both the potential plaintiff and the potential defendant were over and done with before October 3, 1973. That evidence of intent had no application to the Adams fact situation.
Considerations of common fairness, which we may confidently assume guided *546the 1973 Legislature in enacting chapter 466, support the foregoing analysis of that Legislature’s intent. In the context of the particular facts of the Bernier and Clark cases, I believe that fair-minded legislators were not likely to have imposed strict liability upon the manufacturer cumulatively to the existing common law liability for negligence. Here the sole product defect alleged by plaintiffs arose out of defendant’s failure to warn of dangers of the product. In the Bemier-Clark situation, any opportunity to warn the user or to recall or redesign the product expired as soon as the user was last exposed to it — long before 1973. Once Mr. Bernier and Mr. Clark inhaled the asbestos dust, they had already suffered the only harm-causing impact that a warning might have spared them. In the physical harm done by dangerous products, as elsewhere, “the moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.” Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald trans. 1952) at 66. In sharp contrast to the situation of defendant Raymark vis-á-vis Mr. Bernier and Mr. Clark, the manufacturer of the drill press that caused the 1979 injury to Mr. Adams had a. six-year opportunity after enactment of section 221 to recall the drill press or to warn the user of its danger. To find whether the 1973 Legislature meant to treat the Adams and the Bemier-Clark situations in exactly the same way, we must examine section 221 “in the transforming light of [the] real life situation.” Lagasse v. Hannaford Bros. Co., 497 A.2d 1112, 1117 (Me.1985). After seeking legislative intent, the Adams court (443 A.2d at 944) concluded that the 1973 “Legislature could rationally and properly intend the occurrence of [the] injury” to the drill press user to be the event bringing the user’s claim under section 221. It, however, cannot be concluded on the Bemier-Clark facts, where the manufacturer had no post-1973 opportunity for warning or recall, that nonetheless “the Legislature could rationally and properly intend” to impose the additional, heightened strict liability upon the manufacturer. It contradicts basic tenets of fairness to assume that the 1973 Legislature — without saying so explicitly or by necessary implication — intended to give a cause of action in strict liability where the manufacturer lacked any means whatever of preventing or mitigating harm from a product sold long in the past.
In sum, standard methods of statutory construction lead to a negative answer to the third certified question.
II.
The court’s opinion reaches a contrary conclusion as a result of its failure to seek out the intent of the 1973 Legislature as to the Bemier-Clark circumstances. In my judgment the opinion goes astray in several specific respects. First, rather than approaching the third question as one involving the 1973 Legislature’s intent, the court’s opinion cites Adams (443 A.2d at 943), without quoting it, for the court’s present pronouncement that “[a] cause of action arises under section 221 when a person has a judicially recognizable claim against a defendant.” (See p. 541) The court’s opinion then goes through a doctrinal exercise — completely detached from what the 1973 Legislature in context is likely to have intended — to determine when this court, not the Legislature, would view Mr. Bernier and Mr. Clark to have judicially recognizable claims. The court’s present reading of Adams as laying down for all fact situations a rule of temporal application that doctrinally controls our answer to question 3 is, I believe, entirely unjustified. Our fact-specific finding of legislative intent 2 in the radically different circumstances involved in Adams (all harm-causing im*547pact there having occurred after the effective date of section 221) tells us nothing of what the 1973 Legislature intended in the Bemier-Clark situation (all harm-causing impact here having occurred before 1973). Our task here is to find the 1973 Legislature’s intent on the specific Bemier-Clark facts, not to make a theoretical doctrinal extension of a rule abstracted from the specific legislative intent found by us on the very different Adams facts.
Second, the court’s opinion treats the 1973 enactment as if section 2 had been written to read: “This Act shall apply to any cause of action arising after the effective date of this Act.” That is not how the 1973 Legislature framed section 2. See n. 1 above. By section 2 the Act was not to be construed to affect any cause of action arising prior to its effective date, but section 2 did not say conversely that all causes of action arising after October 3, 1973 would be “affected” or controlled by the new Act. Least of all did section 2 say that any and all causes of action that this court might later find became “judicially recognizable” after October 3, 1973, were to be controlled by section 221. Even though the court’s opinion in the cases at bar declares that the cause of action on the Bemier-Clark facts arises when discovered, rather than at the time of harm-causing impact, section 2 of the 1973 statute did not say that the new strict liability should then automatically apply in those particular fact circumstances. See Adams, 443 A.2d at 942. To find the intent of the 1973 Legislature, we must look at the whole text and context of the 1973 enactment, not at just a reconstructed section 2.
Third, beyond Adams, the court’s opinion in answering question 3 relies upon cases from outside Maine that decide issues entirely different from the question certified to us. All but two of those out-of-state cases are statute-of-limitation cases (see at p. 542 n. 7), which applied a discovery rule for determining whether a subsisting cause of action was time-barred; not whether a legislature is likely to have intended to create an additional strict liability cause of action against manufacturers whose products had already completed their harm-causing impact upon users. The equitable and other policy considerations leading a court to apply a discovery rule in order to defer the start of a period of limitations are obviously very different from the public considerations the 1973 Legislature would weigh in deciding the temporal applicability of a cumulative, heightened liability it was imposing on product manufacturers effective October 3, 1973. Note that the 1973 Legislature was not cutting off the existing negligence cause of action. Rather, it was creating a second, additional cause of action and we must find when the 1973 Legislature intended the second layer of liability to start to apply to defective products.
The judicial lawmaking in adopting a discovery rule3 in the out-of-state cases relied upon by the court’s opinion involved an equitable balancing of the interests of the competing parties in light of the purposes of statutes of limitation; those purposes “include encouraging promptness in instituting actions, suppressing stale or fraudulent claims, and avoiding inconvenience which may stem from delay when it is practicable to assert rights.” Harig v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., 394 A.2d 299, 302 (Md.1978). See also Raymond v. Eli Lilly & Co., 117 N.H. 164, 170, 371 A.2d 170, 174 (1977). It is true that, in creating a new and cumulative cause of action, the 1973 Legislature would also take into account considerations of fairness as between the potential litigants. Those considerations, however, would have little or nothing to do with the rationale underlying statutes of limitation and they weigh *548heavily against, rather than for, imposing a new, heightened liability upon sellers of products that have already in the past had their unrecallable harm-causing impact upon their users.
With exactly as little or much justification as the out-of-state statute-of-limitation cases, our own recent decisions that for the first time applied a discovery rule in certain circumstances could be cited and relied upon directly by the court’s opinion here. See Myrick v. James, 444 A.2d 987 (Me.1982) (statute-of-limitation discovery rule applied in medical malpractice cases), overruling Tantish v. Szendey, 158 Me. 228, 182 A.2d 660 (1962) (injury from surgeon’s leaving foreign object in patient’s body occurred at time of operation). See also Anderson v. Neal, 428 A.2d 1189 (Me.1981) (statute-of-limitation discovery rule applied in legal malpractice case). Citation of those Maine cases would immediately expose, however, the incongruity of looking to judicial decisions involving statutes of limitation for the purpose of divining what the 1973 Legislature intended on a quite different subject. It is true that in negative terms the 1973 Legislature excluded from being affected by section 221 “any cause of action arising prior to the effective date of this Act.” P.L. 1973, ch. 466, § 2, see n. 1 above. Although that language bears some resemblance to the language of the statutes of limitation involved in Myrick and Anderson which bar suits commenced more than a prescribed period “after the cause of action accrues,” it takes a bold leap to assert that the similar words were intended by the 1973 Legislature to mean the identical thing in two different contexts. Indeed, if we assume arguendo that the 1973 Legislature in selecting the “cause of action arising” language had in mind incorporating by reference judge-made statute-of-limitation rules then existing in Maine, the conclusion is mandated that it intended section 221 not to apply to the Bemier-Clark circumstances. In 1973 Tantish v. Szendey, supra, involving a foreign object left in the body after surgery, was the controlling declaration by the Law Court that a cause of action accrues for statute-of-limitation purposes when a wrongful invasion of the person occurs, even though no manifestation or discovery of that wrong occurs until later.4
Finally, even under the Adams formulation and the out-of-state statute-of-limitation cases cited by the court’s opinion, section 221 does not apply on the Bemier-Clark facts. Adams concluded that the 1973 Legislature “intend[ed] the occurrence of an injury to be the event to give an injured party” a cause of action under section 221. Adams v. Buffalo Forge Co., 443 A.2d at 944 (emphasis added). Although the cited out-of-state cases applied a discovery rule to defer the start of the period of limitation, nearly every one expressly recognized that the injured party had in fact suffered injury at a time earlier than the time of discovery. See, e.g., Harig v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., 394 A.2d at 305 (“In cases where the initial injury is inherently unknowable, ... the statute of limitations should not begin to run until the plaintiff should reasonably learn of the cause of action”). Those cases applied a discovery rule, regardless of when the injury had occurred, on the basis of considerations relevant to the purposes of statutes of limitation. Id. at 302. Thus, the cases cited by the court’s opinion do not logically support the ascription to the 1973 Legislature of an intent to impose the new strict liability on products that had already prior to 1973 had their full harm-causing impact upon the plaintiff users.
In sum, error in decisional methodology has led the court’s opinion to an end result *549that, in my view, is diametrically opposed to what both the text and proper context of section 221 show is the most plausible interpretation of the 1978 Legislature’s intent on the Bemier-Clark facts.
III.
Despite defendant Raymark’s argument framed in constitutional terms (at p. 541), I do not view question 3 as asking whether application of section 221 to the Bernier-Clark facts would be unconstitutional. That is here a difficult question, and the answer given by Adams, based on the facts of Adams, 443 A.2d at 943, does not answer the question for Bernier and Clark. To respond to question 3, however, we need not decide that difficult constitutional question. There is no imperative at work in legislative affairs that impels new statutory causes of action to go to the brink of unconstitutionality.5 On the contrary, by an established canon of statutory construction, legislators are presumed to avoid constitutional problems. See Maine Milk Producers v. Commissioner of Agriculture, 483 A.2d 1213, 1218 (Me.1984). Constitutional concerns as well as an innate sense of fairness would lead the 1973 Legislature, I am confident, to limit the new strict liability to situations like Adams where the harm-causing impact occurred after section 221 took effect, leaving unchanged a user’s cause of action for injuries caused by previous impact by defective products to be governed by the common law of negligence.
I would answer question 3 in the negative; 14 M.R.S.A. § 221 does not apply where all inhalation of the asbestos dust that caused the diseases and deaths complained of occurred before October 3, 1973, regardless of when the physical harm from the dust manifested itself or was diagnosed.

. P.L. 1973, ch. 466, which enacted what is now 14 M.R.S.A. § 221 (1980), reads in full as follows:
Sec. 1. R.S., T. 14, c. 10, additional. Title 14 of the Revised Statutes is amended by adding a new chapter 10 to read as follows:
CHAPTER 10 LIABILITY
§ 221. Defective or unreasonably dangerous goods
One who sells any goods or products in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user or consumer or to his property is subject to liability for physical harm thereby caused to a person whom the manufacturer, seller or supplier might reasonably have expected to use, consume or be affected by the goods, or to his property, if the seller is engaged in the business of selling such a product and it is expected to and does reach the user or consumer without significant change in the condition in which it is sold. This section applies although the seller has exercised all possible care in the preparation and sale of his product and the user or consumer has not bought the product from or entered into any contractual relation with the seller.
Sec. 2. Application. This Act shall not be construed to affect any cause of action arising prior to the effective date of this Act.
The effective date of that Act was October 3, 1973.

. In Adams we laid out with particularity the process by which our conclusion was there reached:
[W]e look first to the intent of the Legislature as to the application of Section 221 and to the events it intended to be significant in the determination of legal consequences under Section 221.
443 A.2d at 942. Any such approach is conspicuously absent from the court’s opinion in the case at bar.

. Courts do not adopt a discovery rule as the result of determining legislative intent. Rather, "the discovery rule is a judicial creation, fashioned to solve a specific problem, namely, whether the law should preclude recovery for an injury that not even a diligent party may reasonably be expected to discover." Anthony v. Koppers Co., 425 A.2d 428, 432 (Pa.Super.Ct.1980) (emphasis added), reversed on other grounds, 496 Pa. 119, 436 A.2d 181 (1981).

. When the 1973 Legislature was enacting section 221, the Maine rule declared by Tantish v. Szendey was by no means unique to this state. In fact, the 1971 edition of Prosser on Torts recognized that the older or traditional approach was represented by such cases as Tantish v. Szendey and that at that time the discovery rule had been extended beyond medical malpractice claims only by "a sprinkling of cases.” Prosser on Torts § 30 at 144-45 (4th ed. 1971).

. As said in Miller v. Fallon, 134 Me. 145, 148, 183 A. 416, 417 (1936), "It does not follow ... that, because the legislature possessed the power to enact a retroactive statute of limitations, ... it did so in the passage of the amendment under consideration."