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Gladstone v. Bartlesville Independent School District No. 303/18/2003
he claims in which the plaintiff may have access to a collateral indemnity source much more generous than that afforded by the workers' compensation regime. She urges that subdiv. 14 has not been tested by extant jurisprudence for constitutional conformity on the ground she presses. According to Gladstone, Childs is factually distinguishable. There subdiv. 14 was attacked as offensive to equal treatment either for (a) Texas and Oklahoma citizens or for (c) governmental and nongovernmental employees. She claims Smith provides no support for District's position because there the court relied solely on Childs without providing an independent equal protection analysis. She directs us to Bernthal v. City of St. Paul where a similar exemption was condemned as constitutionally infirm. Gladstone urges the court to adopt the Minnesota solution.
District asserts that Gladstone has identified no reason for this court to depart from precedent established in Childs and Smith. According to District, West Virginia jurisprudence upheld an exemption similar to subdiv. 14 and expressly rejected the argument Gladstone presses here. We are urged to adopt the rationale of West Virginia and uphold the validity of the legislation in contest.
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that no state "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." An "equal protection analysis requires strict scrutiny of a legislative classification only when the classification impermissibly interferes with the exercise of a fundamental right [such as the right to vote, the right of interstate travel, rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, or the right to procreate] or operates to the peculiar disadvantage of a suspect class [such as a class based on race, alienage or ancestry]." Although not an absolute guarantee of equality of operation or application of state legislation, the Equal Protection Clause is intended to safeguard the quality of governmental treatment against arbitrary discrimination. Economic legislation - like that tendered for testing here - which is not drawn upon inherently suspect classifications or impinges upon anyone's fundamental rights must generally be upheld against an equal protection attack when the legislative means are rationally related to a legitimate governmental purpose.
It is not urged here that the challenged scheme is drawn upon some inherently suspect classification. Nor does our research find that governmental tort claimants have ever been held to form a protected class entitled to a heightened standard of review. Gladstone claims that subdiv. 14 arbitrarily and unfairly burdens a fundamental right - the right to life as well as stifles the exercise of a fundamental personal liberty - that of obtaining redress from a governmental tortfeasor.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has examined "right-to-life" issues in other contexts, Gladstone has presented nothing to show that bringing a wrongful death action against a governmental tortfeasor is a fundamental right for federal equal protection purposes. Because there is no federal supreme court jurisprudence which imposes upon the states some canonical regime of constitutionally acceptable public tort liability, we must decline today either (a) to craft a mandate in advance of the highest court's authoritative pronouncement or (b) to hold that the legislature's exclusion from state tort liability of persons similarly situated to the decedent arbitrarily impinges upon a fundamental value.
Rational-Basis Review
Because we are dealing here neither with a suspect classification nor with an infringement upon a fundamental right, the rational-ba
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