Court Opinion

ID: 9741588
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:58:36.297324+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:24.866101
License: Public Domain

PAUL H. ANDERSON, J.
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. I agree with the majority’s conclusion that our holdings in Regie de l’assurance Auto, du Quebec v. Jensen, 399 N.W.2d 85 (Minn.1987), and In re Gilliard, No. C2-91-1811, 1992 WL 121622 (Minn. May 15, 1992), stand in the way of granting Ortiz the relief she seeks. Accordingly, I do not, as the court of appeals did, believe Regie and Gilliard can be sufficiently distinguished from the present case to avoid a conflict in our case law should we hold that Ortiz is free to proceed with her amended claim. However, I do agree with the result reached by the court of appeals.
As a lower appellate court, the court of appeals is bound to follow our court’s precedents, even when the court of appeals regards those precedents as violative of fairness and justice and at variance with legislative intent. Here, the court of appeals knew it was bound by the precedent established in Regie and followed in Gilli-ard, but still in good faith concluded that this precedent was wrong when applied to the facts of this case. Therefore, the court of appeals took the only avenue open to it and strove to distinguish those cases. The court of appeals’ effort was doomed to failure — as the majority points out, Regie and Gilliard simply cannot be distinguished from the present case. However, as a member of our state’s highest court, I am in a position to advocate directly that which the court of appeals was without authority to change. Accordingly, I conclude that Regie and Gilliard, insofar as their holdings would preclude application of the relation back doctrine to claims brought under Minn.Stat. § 573.02 — the Wrongful Death Act — should be overruled.
I do not reach this conclusion lightly. The doctrine of stare decisis ensures stability in our law by advocating adherence to decided case law. See In re Gardner’s Trust, 266 Minn. 127, 134, 123 N.W.2d 69, 74 (1963). I agree with this doctrine and do not suggest that we should, without justification, overturn the learning, wisdom, and experience of the past, especially when we have recently spoken on an issue. Further, I recognize that a change in the law should not be based upon a change in the membership of the court because “[a] basic change in the law upon a ground no firmer than a change in our membership invites the popular misconception that this institution is little different from the two political branches of the Government.” Mitchell v. W.T. Grant Co., 416 U.S. 600, 636, 94 S.Ct. 1895, 40 L.Ed.2d 406 (1974) (Stewart, J., dissenting). My belief in these precepts and my desire to honor them cause me to come to my conclusion in this case with great reluctance.
But the doctrine of stare decisis “is not an inflexible rule of law but rather a policy of the law.” Toetschinger v. Ihnot, 312 Minn. 59, 83, 250 N.W.2d 204, 217 (1977) (Yetka, J., dissenting) (citing Johnson v. Chicago, B. & Q. R.R. Co., 243 Minn. 58, 68, 66 N.W.2d 763, 770 (1954)). On the topic, Mr. Justice Benjamin Cardozo once wrote:
[W]hen a rule, after it has been duly tested by experience, has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare, there should be less hesitation in frank avowal and full abandonment. * * * “Change of this character should not be left to the legislature.” If judges have wofully [sic] misinterpreted the mores of their day, or if the mores of their day are no longer those of ours, they ought not to tie, in helpless submission, the hands of their successors.
Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process, 150-152 (1921) (internal citation omitted). Stare decisis should not require us to be bound by an unsound principle. In the words of an early decision of the California Supreme Court, “the mere fact *125that an error has been committed is no reason or even apology for repeating it, much less for perpetuating it.” Hart v. Burnett, 15 Cal. 530, 600-01 (1860). As with past rules to which we adhered too long, I believe that the rule of law we announced in Regie and Gilliard runs contrary to fairness, justice, and equity and therefore should be overruled.
In Regie, we held that an amendment seeking to reflect the appointment of an insurance company as trustee in a wrongful death action could not relate back to the date of the original filing of the action because the original action, having been initiated before the insurance company was duly • appointed trustee, was a “legal nullity,” a term which we neither elaborated upon nor defined. 399 N.W.2d at 92. In Gilliard, a summary reversal order, we similarly held that the Wrongful Death Act “requires the appointment of a trustee prior to the expiration of the 3-year statute of limitations, not the mere filing of a petition therefor within the statutory period.” 1992 WL 121622, at *1.
While both Regie and Gilliard find some support in a long line of cases beginning with Rugland v. Anderson, 30 Minn. 386, 15 N.W. 676 (1883), where we established that adherence to the statute of limitations is a condition precedent to maintaining a wrongful death claim, I fail to see how prohibiting application of the relation back doctrine to wrongful death claims necessarily flows from those earlier eases. In this regard, I want to make it quite clear that I do not advocate overturning one-hundred plus years of case law and reasoning. But, even if we take the long-held proposition advocated in Rugland and its progeny to be true, we are left with the undeniable fact that in the present case a complaint asserting a wrongful death claim was filed within three years of Ortiz’s husband’s death, thereby satisfying the condition precedent. Although Ortiz filed that complaint in the wrong capacity, nothing in the language or purpose of the Wrongful Death Act requires us to ignore the fact that a wrongful death claim was timely filed by the surviving spouse.
The language of the Wrongful Death Act does not mandate the result reached by the majority. The Act provides that a trustee “may maintain ” a wrongful death action and that, at the beneficiary’s request, the court shall appoint “a suitable and competent person as trustee to commence or continue [the] action.” Minn.Stat. § 573.02, subds. 1 and 3 (1998) (emphasis added). Black’s Law Dictionary recognizes that the term “maintain” has numerous meanings, including “carry on; commence; continue; * * * hold or preserve in any particular state or condition; keep from falling, declining, or ceasing; keep in existence or continuance.” Black’s Law Dictionary 953 (6th ed.1990). Garner’s Dictionary of Modem Legal Usage provides that maintain “is not synonymous with begin or institute; it embraces the idea of continuing or upholding.” Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modem Legal Usage 541 (2d ed.1995). Thus, the Act could be interpreted as leaving open the possibility that a wrongful death action may be initiated prior to the appointment of a trustee, but that appointment of a trustee is necessary to continue with the action. In any event, the language of the Act does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that a wrongful death action brought before the appointment of a trustee is nothing more than a “legal nullity.”
We have long recognized that the remedial purpose behind the Wrongful Death Act is to rectify the inequity that existed in common law where civil recovery was permitted for torts causing injury, but not for those causing death. See Fussner v. Andert, 261 Minn. 347, 350, 113 N.W.2d 355, 357 (1961). To deny to Ortiz application of the relation back doctrine — a corrective remedy generally available to common law tort actions — simply because her complaint asserts a wrongful death claim perpetuates this inequity in violation of the Act’s purpose.
Furthermore, there is no merit to the assertion that the Wrongful Death Act’s statute of limitations is jurisdictional. As the majority points out, if the statute of limitations in Minn.Stat. § 573.02 were truly jurisdictional, then even the most compelling notion of equity could not resurrect an expired claim. However, we have in the past allowed equity to circumvent the statutory time limit for bringing a wrongful death claim. See De-*126Cosse v. Armstrong Cork Co., 319 N.W.2d 45, 52 (Minn.1982) (applying to a wrongful death claim the common law rule tolling a statute of limitations in cases where the delay in bringing the action was by reason of fraud on the part of the defendant). DeCosse effectively precluded further argument that the Act’s statute of limitations is jurisdictional and opened the door for equitable arguments to circumvent the Act’s three-year limit.
In Regie itself, we relied on equity to help justify our harsh rule. We acknowledged in Regie that the vast majority of other jurisdictions do allow the relation back doctrine to apply to wrongful death claims and then distinguished those cases by stating that they frequently involved “blameless errors”; i.e., the party seeking to amend the complaint was not at fault for the delay in bringing the action. 399 N.W.2d at 90. We then spent a paragraph highlighting the inequity of allowing the insurance company’s amendment to relate back, pointing out that the insurance company was not appointed trustee until 14 months after the statute of limitations had expired and then waited an additional eight months to amend its complaint. Id. Thus, under the facts and equities of Regie, use of the relation back doctrine in that case may indeed have been inappropriate. However, our reliance on Regie to justify a blanket prohibition of the relation back doctrine in all wrongful death cases has proven to be anything but equitable. Since Regie, we have applied this harsh rule twice, and neither time has fairness and justice been served. Using the words of Justice Cardozo, this rule “has been tested by experience [and] has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice.”
Gilliard, for example, was clearly a case where equity did not support the application of Regie’s harsh rule of law. There, the respondent had properly signed and filed her application to be appointed trustee with the clerk of court. In re Gilliard, No. C2-91-1811, 1992 WL 48044, at *1 (Minn.App. March 17, 1992). The court of appeals concluded that respondent’s failure to be appointed trustee was through no fault of her own, but instead was “caused by the court administrator’s failure to bring the application to the court’s attention and the attorney’s failure to ensure that an order appointing a trustee was considered and signed.” Id. Moreover, the court of appeals recognized that the rules of civil procedure specifically allowed the lower court to correct such clerical errors. Id. (citing Minn. R. Civ. P. 60.01). Despite the equities favoring the respondent, we summarily disallowed the respondent’s claim without citing to anything in the Wrongful Death Act’s language or underlying policy that required us to do so. Gilliard, 1992 WL 121622.
Likewise, in the present case, there can be no doubt that equity urges a result different from that reached by the majority. Ortiz timely completed all documents necessary to secure her appointment as trustee. She brought her claim to an attorney well within the statute of limitations, signed and returned all of the documents required for her to be appointed trustee, and, believing that she had been so appointed, timely served and filed a complaint specifically raising a wrongful death claim. Only a mistake by an assistant of Ortiz’s attorney precluded Ortiz’s claim from continuing. A review of our case law shows that in nearly any other context such a mistake would not be fatal to Ortiz’s claim because the district court could simply apply the amendment and relation back doctrine espoused in Minn. R. Civ. P. 15 and 17.01.
Rules 15.03 and 17.01 of the Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure permit amendments substituting or adding a party to a cause of action to relate back to the date of original filing of the complaint in order to circumvent an expired statute of limitations. The purpose of this relation back doctrine is to prevent meritorious cases from being dismissed for technical, procedural violations. See Carlson v. Hennepin County, 479 N.W.2d 50, 57 (Minn.1992) (citing Buysse v. Baumann-Furrie & Co., 448 N.W.2d 865, 871 (Minn.1989)).
Historically, we have applied these rules and have permitted the relation back of amendments so long as the defendant has adequate notice of the claim against him and would not be unfairly prejudiced by the relation back of the amendment. See Grothe v. *127Shaffer, 305 Minn. 17, 22, 232 N.W.2d 227, 231 (1975). Where these equitable factors have not been met, we have denied application of the doctrine. See, e.g., Bigay v. Garvey, 575 N.W.2d 107 (Minn.1998); Johnson v. Soo Line R.R. Co., 463 N.W.2d 894 (Minn.1990). In Regie, we forbid application of the relation back doctrine to wrongful death claims on the ground that the original claim was a “legal nullity,” but we have repeatedly applied the relation back doctrine in cases where the original unamended complaint could not have withstood a motion for judgment on the pleadings. See, e.g., Carlson v. Hennepin County, 479 N.W.2d 50 (Minn.1992) (holding that an amendment changing the identity of the defendant to the party actually liable for the injuries could relate back to the date of original filing); Fore v. Crop Hail Management, 270 N.W.2d 13 (Minn.1978) (same); Nelson v. Glenwood Hills Hospitals, 240 Minn. 505, 62 N.W.2d 73 (1953). We have also applied the relation back doctrine to permit the addition and substitution of plaintiffs. See Grothe v. Shaffer, 305 Minn. 17, 232 N.W.2d 227 (1975). Moreover, despite our reluctance in Regie to apply the relation back doctrine to purely statutory causes of action, we have previously applied Rule 15.03 to permit the relation back of amendments to statutory claims. See Sivenson v. Emerson Elec. Co., 374 N.W.2d 690 (Minn.1985) (applying the relation back doctrine to permit the addition of a claim seeking damages under the federal Consumer Products Safety Act); Heyn v. Braun, 239 Minn. 496, 59 N.W.2d 326 (1953) (applying the relation back doctrine to a mechanic’s lien action).
Here, the amendment Ortiz seeks clearly falls within the equitable parameters of Rules 15.03 and 17.01. Gavenda concedes that it would suffer no prejudice from the amendment. The amendment would merely correct Ortiz’s complaint to reflect her appointment as trustee. Even with the amendment, Ortiz would still be the person pursuing the suit, Gavenda would still be the defendant, and the factual and legal issues would be unchanged. Thus, Gavenda received effective notice of Ortiz’s suit by means of the original complaint. Still, the majority continues to deny application of the relation back doctrine to Ortiz’s complaint simply because we denied application of the doctrine to wrongful death claims in Regie and affirmed that reasoning in Gilliard, To continue this anomalous treatment of wrongful death claims without statutory or policy justification is to ignore justice for the sake of continuity. Accordingly, I would hold that Regie and Gilliard are overruled to the extent that they preclude application of the amendment and relation back principles of Minn. R. Civ. P. 15 and 17 to wrongful death claims, and would permit Ortiz to amend her complaint and proceed with her claim.