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Gladstone v. Bartlesville Independent School District No. 303/18/2003
absence of reason for this arbitrary distinction.
The parties inform us that a similar exclusion from governmental tort liability has withstood an equal protection challenge in West Virginia (O'Dell v. Town of Gauley Bridge), but was struck down in Minnesota (Bernthal v. City of St. Paul). The West Virginia court observed that in Oregon (Edwards v. State Military Dept.) a like exemption had passed constitutional muster. In Edwards, the court reasoned that the legislature need not include all persons who were otherwise covered by insurance within the excepted class because that body is not required to enact laws which operate to solve every aspect of the problem in a perfect manner. The Oregon court also opined that the legislature may have concluded it was best to confine the exception to a compensation system with which it was familiar (i.e., one that it had created). Citing Edwards with approval, the West Virginia court reached a similar result in O'Dell. There the line drawn between the two classes of tort claimants was declared not to be without logic. This is so because persons covered by workers' compensation must also forego their common-law tort remedies against the employers, while those who have no access to compensation benefits retain the right to sue their employers for a full range of damages. The court explicitly rejected the Minnesota solution in Bernthal. Bernthal, on the other hand, focused on the lack of any legislative history shedding light on the purpose of the statute. It perceived the want of legislative facts to be critical to its constitutional analysis, holding that even if the statute furthered the legislative purpose of protecting the political subdivision's financial integrity, the classification was nonetheless based upon impermissible criteria wholly unrelated to that objective -the source of indemnity benefits.
Although Oklahoma, like Minnesota, lacks legislative history materials that identify the basis for the exception in contest, that fact alone affords no basis for judging the legislative wisdom in excluding the disputed category of claims from public tort liability. Making classifications is at the heart of the legislative function. In the economic sphere, it is only the invidious discrimination - the purely arbitrary act that cannot stand in harmony with the federal and state equal rights guarantee - which will doom legislation. Because the legislature could have eliminated from the benefit of public tort liability all classes of persons who have access to collateral sources of indemnity, it is not constitutionally impermissible for the legislature to have drawn lines between groups of insured persons for the purpose of protecting the public fisc by reducing the number of potential tort claimants or of phasing out those benefits. Legislative reform may take "one step at a time, addressing itself to the phase of the problem which seems most acute to the legislative mind." The task of classifying persons for exclusion from public tort liability inevitably requires that some persons who have an almost equally strong claim to favored treatment be placed on different sides of the line, and the fact that the line might have been drawn differently at some points is a matter for legislative, rather than judicial, judgment. We cannot say that the challenged classification so lacks rationality as to amount to a denial of equal protection.
B. Due Process Challenge
Gladstone argues that subdiv. 14 is an arbitrary act because it requires that an Oklahoma citizen be restricted to workers' compensation benefits as her sole redress for the deprivation of her husband's life (or health) while the real wrongdoer (the public entity) escapes witho
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