Court Opinion

ID: 9627899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:58:22.618318+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:08.315995
License: Public Domain

MATTHEWS, Justice,
joined by RABI-NO WITZ, Chief Justice, dissenting.
The normal rule of retroactivity provides any litigant or prospective litigant with the benefit of a new court ruling so long as the point is timely raised.1
*348Concerning civil cases, this court has held that retroactivity is the rule and prospectivity is the exception. See Plumley v. Hale, 594 P.2d 497, 502 (Alaska 1979) (absent special circumstances, a new rule is binding in the case before the court and in all subsequent cases in which the point in question is raised regardless of when facts leading to the case occurred).
CFEC v. Byayuk, 684 P.2d 114, 117 (Alaska 1984).
The United States Supreme Court has endorsed a similar view. In Griffith v. Kentucky, — U.S. -, -, 107 S.Ct. 708, 716, 93 L.Ed.2d 649, 661 (1987), the Court held that a new decision concerning constitutional law in the context of a criminal case should be retroactively applied to “all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet final, with no exception for cases in which the new rule constitutes a ‘clear break’ with the past.” The court explained that
it is the nature of judicial review that precludes us from “[sjimply fishing one case from the stream of appellate review, using it as a vehicle for pronouncing new constitutional standards, and then permitting a stream of similar cases subsequently to flow by unaffected by that new rule.”
Id., — U.S. at-, 107 S.Ct. at 713, 93 L.Ed.2d at 658, citing Mackey v. United States, 401 U.S. 667, 679, 91 S.Ct. 1160, 1173, 28 L.Ed.2d 404, 412-13 (1971) (Harlan, J., concurring in judgments).
There is no reason to deviate from the normal rule of retroactivity in the present case. Any claim pending on direct review or any case that was not final at the time that Grant was rendered should have the benefit of our holding in Grant.
The insurance company’s reliance interest does not mandate a different result. Full retroactive application of Grant would involve a measure of unfairness to workers’ compensation insurers who have set their rates based on the Cesar approach. This, however, is a problem which is always encountered when there is a change in the law brought about by judicial decision. An insurer’s reliance interest is insufficient to compel prospective application of a change in the law unless the insurer presents a compelling case of grave financial consequences.2 No such showing has been presented in this case.
Professor Keeton’s rationale for retrospective overruling in civil cases is persuasive:
It is sometimes suggested that retrospective overruling in tort cases is unfair not only to the uninsured institutions but also to the liability insurers whose rates have been set in reliance on precedent and to the group of policyholders who will pay higher than the compensatory premiums in order to make up for the losses the insurers suffered by collecting inadequate premiums over the period to *349which the overruled decision retrospectively applies. But the implications of this view make it wholly unacceptable. First, its general acceptance would in effect disable courts from creative decisions in accident law. Second, the need for protection of the reliance interest is much less significant in this context than in the context of uninsured institutions, since the risk of disastrous impact upon a particular insurer is so much less serious. Some guarantee of this appraisal appears in the fact that ordinarily it is impossible to trace the impact of particular legal doctrines upon liability insurance rates. Also, even where the doctrinal change is one that might promptly affect rates, as in the case of overruling an immunity, a contrast between the reliance of an insurer and the reliance of an institution in not insuring remains. A single heavy judgment against an uninsured hospital would be more likely to spell catastrophe than the number of such judgments that would fall on a single insurer. Moreover, there is a good prospect of the insurer’s spreading the loss among a group that comes fairly close to corresponding to the group of policyholders who might appropriately have been required to pay higher premiums if the overruling decision had been forecast.
Keeton, Creative Continuity in the Law of Torts, 75 Harv.L.Rev. 463, 492-93 (1962) (emphasis added, footnote omitted).
Moreover, any unfairness to the insurer, which is compelled to pay benefits that were not foreseen in the insurance rate structure, is at least equally balanced by the unfairness which each claimant is forced to suffer when he does not receive the benefits which the law, properly construed, affords him, and which the legislature intended to provide. Every dollar saved by an insurance carrier under an improper construction of the law is a dollar taken from the legal entitlement of a claimant. We have previously said that the Workers’ Compensation Act should be liberally construed in favor of claimants. Hood v. State, 574 P.2d 811, 813 (Alaska 1978). When the equities are evenly divided this rule of construction requires a decision in favor of the claimants.
For these reasons the judgment of the superior court should be reversed.

. The timeliness requirement can be illustrated by two of our cases, Kaatz v. State, 540 P.2d 1037 (Alaska 1975), and Lawrence v. Lawrence, 718 P.2d 142 (Alaska 1986). In Kaatz, we overruled the doctrine that contributory negligence is a complete bar to a plaintiffs claim in favor of a system of comparative negligence. We made the new system retroactively applicable to all cases in which the issue could be timely raised, namely: (a) in the retrial of Kaatz itself; (b) in any trial beginning after the date of the Kaatz opinion, regardless of when the cause of action arose; (c) in any case pending on direct appeal when the Kaatz opinion was issued, so *348long as the plaintiff had asserted his entitlement to comparative negligence at trial and had preserved the point as a point on appeal; and (d) in any trial in progress on the date of the Kaatz opinion. 540 P.2d at 1050.
By contrast, in Lawrence, a litigant was denied the retroactive benefit of a prior court ruling, Dowling v. Dowling, 679 P.2d 480 (Alaska 1984), which in turn overruled Hinchey v. Hinchey, 625 P.2d 297 (Alaska 1981). Dowling interpreted Alaska’s child support statute to authorize the mandatory payment of child support for minor children only, contrary to the earlier Hinchey case. The applicant in Lawrence was required to pay post-majority child support under a decree issued three months before the Dowling decision. His efforts to change the decree based on Dowling were unsuccessful because he did not raise the post-majority support issue within the 30-day period allowed for taking an appeal. He therefore was precluded from raising the point in a Civil Rule 60(b)(1) motion to modify. 718 P.2d at 145-46.

. Compare EEOC v. Texas Industries, 782 F.2d 547, 552 (5th Cir.1986) (finding no substantial inequity where fiscal soundness of health insurance plan would not be jeopardized by retroactive relief where the overruling law "should have been seen as, at the least, a significant realistic possibility”), with Los Angeles Dep’t of Water & Power v. Manhart, 435 U.S. 702, 719-20, 98 S.Ct. 1370, 1380-81, 55 L.Ed.2d 657, 672-74 (1978) (noting possible devastating effect of retroactive relief on fifty million Americans), and Arizona Governing Comm. v. Norris, 463 U.S. 1073, 1105-07, 103 S.Ct. 3492, 3510-11, 77 L.Ed.2d 1236, 1262-63 (1983) (noting devastating results of holding employers liable retroactively).