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Craftsman Builder's Supply Inc. v. Butler Manufacturing Co.3/5/1999
ut completely restraining lawmakers." Id. at 1208. All courts, however, appear to recognize that "lawmakers cannot deprive plaintiffs of vested rights." Id.
The primary origin of the rights protected by Article I, section 11 and the open courts provisions in most other state constitutions is the Magna Carta. Nevertheless, the adoption of open courts provisions by the various states has been influenced to some extent by conditions threatening those rights at the time the various constitutional provisions were adopted.
The provision in the Magna Carta that is the genesis of American open courts provisions was directed at King John's corruption of the English courts. At the time of the American Revolution, when the first state constitutions were drafted, the evil aimed at was the closing of American colonial civil courts by the English for the purpose of denying civil remedies to the colonists. However,
" y the last quarter of the eighteenth century, during which the American remedy guarantees first appeared, the focus of popular distrust had shifted from the King's courts to the people's representatives. After an unsuccessful early period during which state constitutions contained expansive grants of authority to the legislative branch, the people, disillusioned by what they perceived as legislative corruption (capture by private interest), enacted a "second wave" of state constitutions stripping legislatures of many of their prerogatives and vesting increased power in the judiciary. . . . t the time that many modern American remedy guarantees themselves, or their direct predecessors, were brought into existence, the evil was renegade legislatures that had, for example, deprived injured creditors of their judicial remedies against debtors by passing legislation impairing existing contractual obligations." Id. at 1200-01.
Open courts provisions have served two principal purposes. First, they were intended to help establish an independent foundation for the judiciary as an institution. See Jonathan M. Hoffman, By the Course of the Law: The Origins of the Open Courts Clause of State Constitutions, 74 Or. L. Rev. 1279 (1995); Industrial Comm'n v. Evans, 52 Utah 394, 174 P. 825, 831 (1918) (" he question of ultimate legal liability cannot be withdrawn from the courts."). Second, open courts or remedies clauses were intended to grant individuals rights to a judicial remedy for the protection of their person, property, or reputation from abrogation and unreasonable limitation by economic interests that could control state legislatures. See Schuman, 65 Temp. L. Rev. at 1208; Berry, 717 P.2d at 675.
Justice Zimmerman's opinion totally ignores the history and purposes of open courts provisions, and therefore, he does not even purport to construe Article I, section 11 in light of its purpose and history. Although he purports to analyze the language of section 11, he in fact abandons the plain meaning of the language of that provision in favor of a skewed interpretation that nullifies its most important purpose. The result would undermine a foundation stone of the judiciary and the right that a citizen has to a judicial remedy to protect one's person, property, and reputation by broadening the power of special interests to misuse legislative power at the expense of the rights of the citizens.
In addition, Justice Zimmerman's position flouts the doctrine of stare decisis. He would overrule fifty years of unanimous Utah legal precedent from Masich v. United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Co., 113 Utah 101, 191 P.2d 612 (1948), to Hirpa v. IHC Hospitals, Inc., 948 P.2d 785 (Utah 1997), a case decided by a unanimous court barely one year ag
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