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Boston v. Buchanan12/23/2003
he next legal source above that of the common law consists of statutory enactments. A statute-authorized rule, though of force equal to an enactment, must yield to any contrary legislation. If there be conflict between a statute-authorized rule and enacted statutory law, the latter will control over the former. Another statute-derived class of judicial rulemaking is represented by rules that embrace statutory law within their provisions. That rule genre is akin to a statute. It continues in force so long as the statute remains in effect.
Constitutional Law
The highest legal source in the system is the state constitution, whether embodied in its text, caselaw or in a court rule. A slightly different echelon of constitutional power source is called "inherent." State courts claim as "inherent in them" those constitutional powers which, though neither granted to nor withheld from them by the state constitution (and not found in any inferior source of the system), must nonetheless be conceded to the judiciary as a separate department of the government because their exercise is deemed absolutely essential (or reasonably necessary) for the performance of the courts' constitutionally mandated mission. The cardinal difference between constitutional-law sources and those of inherent powers is that the latter are drawn from the constitution's complete textual vacuum (or from its mere silence). Inherent power can hence be destroyed by subsequent infusion into the vacuum of a discordant content. The use of inherent power may also be barred by the constitution's text that shows the claimed power's absence or its allocation to another service of government.
This court's inherent power finds an eloquent and legally correct recognition in In re Integration of State Bar of Oklahoma. There, the court claimed for itself a constitutionally invested power to control and regulate the practice of law and the licensing, ethics and discipline of legal practitioners in this State. In the wake of In re Integration Oklahoma lawyers are presently licensed and supervised by a single body, centrally organized by the Oklahoma Supreme Court's exercise of its claim to inherent power. Only an express constitutional amendment could now terminate that power's use. In a later jurisprudential source, Puckett v. Cook, the court also acknowledged that the judiciary's inherent power is anchored to the constitution. There, it held unconstitutional a procedural statute restrictively regulating courthouse-level consolidation of cases for trial. Puckett, which teaches that circumscription of the judiciary's power to run its own docket impermissibly invades the courts' "inherent power," explicitly concedes that in order to override a procedural statute the judiciary must draw its trumping authority directly from the constitution.
This State's legislature statutorily recognizes that inherent power is indeed a source of law that commands from a rung higher than the common law and the body of statutory enactments. By the terms of 20 O.S.2001 ยง 24 the legislature set apart (from statute-rested rules) the courts' inherent rulemaking authority. This recognition concedes that the latter class of court rules is indeed impervious to legislative tinkering.
B. Statute-authorized Rules Do Not Rise To A Constitutional Dimension Drawn From The Judiciary's "Inherent Power"
Court rules are not a distinctly separate source of law. Their place in the hierarchy of legal norms depends in every instance on the underlying authority for each rule's promulgation. If authority for a rule is drawn from the constitution, the rule itself takes on a constitutional dimension. If the power for the rule is derive
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