Court Opinion

ID: 9626028
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 07:59:40.05714+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:19.854493
License: Public Domain

Finley, J.
(concurring specially)—I have signed and thus concur in the majority opinion. However, having signed and become a part of the majority, I feel impelled to support and supplement with some comment pertaining particularly to the dissent and to matters high-lighted therein.
First, the dissent is a reiteration, basically, of a thesis which, in the vernacular, might read: “Judges go home— Legislators are the most!” The thesis was rejected by the majority of the court, I think, as long ago as 1953 in Pierce v. Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital Ass’n, 43 Wn. (2d) 162, 260 P. (2d) 765 (1953), and again recently, as I thought and emphasized in concurring specially in Kelso v. Tacoma, 63 Wn. (2d) 913, 390 P. (2d) 2 (1964).
Second, the dissent somewhat curiously seems to favor *180and to applaud the majority’s abrogation of sovereign immunity as a bar to personal injury tort claims.1 But while applauding this development and the action or role of the majority therein, there is, in fact, and somewhat incongrously, a pervasive aura of criticism, disapproval and basic dissent. In other perhaps ancient contexts this might have been characterized as a kind of legerdemain or prestidigitator’s technique, in that the hand, and sometimes the word, is quicker than the eye. Be that as it may, I am at a continuing loss as to how outspoken gladness or enthusiasm over the demise of an old friend can be rationalized or euphemized simply by regretting deeply the manner of his death or execution as the case may be.
Third, it seems to me that the use of word labels or symbolic generalities in the dissent in describing the action of the majority as “legislation” rather than “adjudication,” greatly oversimplifies the nature of the judicial process, its functions and responsibilities, and helps very little in terms of historical perspective and realistic appreciation of judicial responsibility, authority, and function. (See concurring opinion in Kelso v. Tacoma, supra; and Peck, The Role of the Courts and the Legislatures in the Reform of Tort Law, 48 Minn. L. Rev. 265 (1963))'.
It is, I think, both interesting and pertinent at this juncture to recall the clear implications in the Pierce case, supra, that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, a most sublime tribunal, dropped a stitch or two as recently as 1876 in McDonald v. Massachusetts General Hospital, 120 Mass. 432, 21 Am. Rep. 529 (1876). There, the doctrine of charitable immunity was first either judicially created or imported, perhaps even smuggled, into this country, possibly with the general idea of conforming to what seemingly had been the established English common law, evidenced by Lord Cottenham’s dictum in 1839, in Duncan v. *181Findlater, 7 Eng. Rep. 934, and the decision embracing this dictum in 1861 in Holliday v. Vestry of the Parish of St. Leonard, Shoreditch, 142 Eng. Rep. 769. But the Massachusetts judicial error (and a large sized one in terms of any orthodox justification for the indicated spurious judicial import) was in overlooking the fact that the Cottenham dictum and the Holliday case, i.e., the doctrine of charitable immunity, had been repudiated and overruled in England by the judiciary. Thus, paraphrasing the Pierce opinion by Hamley, J., the Massachusetts court resurrected and spuriously imported the charitable immunity doctrine into the United States 5 years after it had been judicially repudiated and apparently not revived legislatively in England.
Fourth, I must agree with the dissent that the Pierce case factually concerned a “paying” rather than a “charity” patient. Furthermore, the opinion specifically held that the claim of the “paying” patient against the hospital for damages for negligently inflicted harm and injury was not barred by the doctrine of charitable immunity. In theory and in a strict sense, in terms of stare decisis, the Pierce case is citable respecting the doctrine of charitable immunity only in cases subsequently arising in which the facts are identical. But it happens only infrequently that the fact patterns of litigated disputes coincide absolutely; and as a practical matter it is common practice that prior decisions are cited on the basis of close, factual comparability. Coupled with this, the full thrust of the Pierce reasoning went beyond the facts there involved. Perhaps this reasoning was dicta, but as I now re-read Pierce I must disagree with the dissent in the instant case, for I think Pierce gave clear indications that charitable immunity was on the way out, and all the way out at that. Furthermore, it now seems to me that the court overlooked and departed from the notice given in Pierce and made inconsistent dispositions in the Lyon v. Tumwater Evangelical Free Church case (47 Wn. (2d) 202, 287 P. (2d) 128 (1955)) and the Pedersen v. Immanuel Lutheran Church case (57 Wn. (2d) 576, 358 P. (2d) 549). As a member of the court at the *182time of Lyon and Pedersen, I accept my share of responsibility for those decisions. Albeit I now join with the majority and approve overruling those cases and their inconsistency with what now seems to me to have been the full thrust of the opinion in Pierce.

With some shift in nomenclature and perhaps in emphasis, what we are really talking about in this case is serious harm and personal injury alleged to have been negligently perpetrated or inflicted on a human body at the hands of a charitable legal entity.