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City of Enid7/5/2005
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The Legislature may classify the ... cities of the state on the basis of population for legislative purposes, when the classification is not arbitrary and capricious, but is founded upon real and substantial distinctions, and the question of population bears some reasonable, rational relation to the subject-matter.
Id. at 546 (First Syllabus by the Court). One of the challenges in Key was based on the then existent prohibitory § 46 ban on special or local law regulating the affairs of cities. Although the legislation under review in Key was held unconstitutional by the Court as a special or local law because of an arbitrary and capricious population classification, nonetheless the Court without question recognized that not all legislative population-based classifications concerning regulation of the affairs of cities or counties, etc. are thereby ipso facto to be considered special or local laws and, thus, automatically violative of § 46. Key has not been overruled by this Court. Nor have Hamilton v. Oklahoma City, 1974 OK 109, 527 P.2d 14, Sanchez v. Melvin, 1966 OK 116, 418 P.2d 639, Pointer v. Town of Chelsea, 1927 OK 9, 257 P. 785 (upholding town population-based legislation over § 46 challenge) and numerous other cases, all of which have recognized the same.
The statement in 15 of the majority opinion, that § 46 somehow requires that "a statute regulating the affairs of cities, must embrace all cities in the state rather than embracing only a subclass of larger cities," is in error, it ignores a plethora of case law on the subject, it changes the intent of § 46 the framers of that provision had in mind and it limits legislative power where the Oklahoma Constitution contains no such constraint. Furthermore, the majority opinion in its 26 misinterprets Reynolds v. Porter, 1988 OK 88, 760 P.2d 816, as standing for the proposition, in essence, that a general law may never come into existence by legislative enactment if any one of the twenty-eight (28) subject areas in § 46 are broken into a more distinct classification (the majority uses the term "subclass"). Reynolds neither holds such nor does any reasonable extrapolation from Reynolds support such a view.
Reynolds itself does not define a special or local law as being coextensive with the category at issue there, "limitation of civil ... actions." Reynolds recognized that civil actions may be classified into specific categories of tort actions of a similar nature for statute of limitation purposes and, obviously, that doing so would not a fortiori be the passage of a special or local law violative of the strictures contained in § 46. Reynolds, 760 P.2d at 823. In other words, Reynolds does not stand for the proposition that the categories of subjects listed in § 46 are always absolute limitations for classification purposes with regard to the test for deciding whether a law relating thereto is a special or local law or, instead, a general law, as the majority apparently believes that Reynolds does. If the majority opinion's view is correct, which I do not believe it is, there could not be different statutes of limitation for contract and tort actions, for written and oral contract actions, for assault and battery, for fraud or for trespass (see 12 O. S. Supp. 2004, § 95 which provides different limitation periods for various types of civil actions), which obviously there are and I do not think a majority of the Justices on this Court believe, if any do, that because these different and distinct types of civil actions are subject to diverse limitation periods they are thereby unconstitutional under a § 46 analysis because they are all civil actions.
The majority opinion seems to ignore the follow
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