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Day v. State5/11/1999
1997), sustained the constitutionality of the Utah Good Samaritan Act against an Article I, section 11 challenge:
"This provision, as we have interpreted it, imposes a substantive limitation on the legislature's ability to eliminate or unduly restrict causes of action seeking relief for injury to "person, property, or reputation." Berry v. Beech Aircraft Corp., 717 P.2d 670, 676 (Utah 1985).
Despite the importance of this function, the rights of individuals protected by the open courts provision must be balanced against the legislature's need to enact laws to meet changing societal needs. Thus, the rights protected by the open courts provision are "not always paramount," id. at 677, and "the Legislature has great latitude in defining, changing, and modernizing the law, and in doing so may create new rules of law and abrogate old ones." Id. at 676. This is so because " t is, in fact, one of the important functions of the Legislature to change and modify the law that governs relations between individuals as society evolves and conditions require." Id. Thus, we will declare a statute violative of the open courts provision only if it "is unreasonable and arbitrary and will not further the statutory objectives." Id. at 681.
The determination of whether a person who is injured in "person, property, or reputation" has been denied a remedy by due course of law should be decided by reference to the general law of rights and remedies at the time that the Legislature abrogates a remedy. Then Chief Justice Hall, writing for a unanimous Court in Sun Valley Water Beds, 782 P.2d at 191, addressed that precise issue in stating that the Legislature "does not have unbridled power to deny to contemporary plaintiffs their existing common law rights and remedies." (Emphasis added.) In Masich v. United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Co., 113 Utah 101, 191 P.2d 612 (Utah 1948), the plaintiff asserted the Legislature had unconstitutionally abrogated his common law action for damages that existed at the time of the lawsuit by enacting the exclusive remedy provision of the Occupational Disease Act. The Court sustained the constitutionality of the abrogation of a plaintiff's common law course of action, but the decision was not concerned at all with the causes of action the plaintiff had as of 1896. See id. at 624-25. The Court was concerned only with whether the remedies provided under the Act were reasonable alternatives to the common law remedies that the Act displaced.
The remedies unconstitutionally abrogated by the statute of repose in Berry were remedies based on the existing body of rights and remedies then available generally to persons injured in their person, property or reputation. The Court in Berry focused only on the abrogation of those legal remedies that were generally available at the time of the lawsuit for the protection of person and property. See 717 P.2d at 681-83. That was also the focus of the Court's analysis in Craftsman Builders Supply, Inc. v. Butler Mfg. Co., 364 Utah Adv. Rep. 22 (1999), Horton v. Goldminer's Daughter, 785 P.2d 1087 (Utah 1989), and Sun Valley Water Beds v. Herm Hughes & Son, 782 P.2d 188 (Utah 1989). Indeed, some of the remedies abrogated in Craftsman, Horton, Sun Valley, and Berry did not even exist in 1896. See Horton, 785 P.2d at 1088-90. Accord, e.g., Hazine v. Montgomery Elevator Co., 861 P.2d 625, 629 (Ariz. 1993); Boswell v. Phoenix Newspapers, 730 P.2d 186, 194-95 (Ariz. 1986), cert denied, 481 U.S. 1029 (1987); Kluger v. White, 281 So. 2d 1, 4 (Fla. 1973); Perkins v. Northeastern Log Homes, 808 S.W.2d 809, 816 (Ky. 1991); Nat'l Ref. Co. v. Seehorn, 127 S.W.2d 418, 424 (Mo. 1939). The general precept was stated more recently
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