John Engler’s Activist Supreme Court
John Engler has fled the state, but unfortunately his legacy lives on. Besides crumbling cities, shuttered factories, and a state budgetary crisis due to a lack of appropriate revenues, he also left us with a few judges who sometimes fail to recognize longstanding rights of working people.
Back in 1912, the Michigan Legislature created a modest weekly benefit for those workers who suffered personal injuries on the job and became disabled in the course of their employment. In 1937, the Michigan Legislature expanded coverage to include those workers who were suffering from occupational diseases. Michigan courts ruled from the beginning that if a personal injury at work caused, aggravated, contributed to or accelerated a disability, the disabled employee was entitled to benefits. The same principle was applied at least as early as 1940 by the Michigan Supreme Court in occupational disease cases These principles have gone unchallenged as fundamental principles of workers’ compensation law–at least until three weeks ago.
You may recall that Engler-appointed Michigan Supreme Court Justices Markman, Taylor, Young and Corrigan ruled in the summer of 2002 that many injured workers do not even have disabilities if they still have the physical capacity to work somewhere else and make the money they used to make; such workers are therefore are not entitled to various protections and benefits under the Act. Last summer, these Justices ruled that disabled workers whose pre-existing conditions were aggravated at work may not be entitled to benefits. And three weeks ago, these Justices, along with Justice Weaver, issued a single paragraph Order, suggesting that workers suffering from occupational diseases are not entitled to weekly benefits where work aggravated, contributed to, or accelerated the disability. The Order suggests cryptically that workers dealing with occupational disease must show that work caused the disability. The Order appears to pretend that Michigan workers suffering from occupational diseases have never been entitled to benefits where the evidence shows that work aggravated, contributed to or accelerated the disability, although the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in 1940 that workers are not required to show that the work exposure was the proximate cause of disability.
The Justices issued this Order without even holding a hearing or writing a full opinion explaining their reasoning. The Michigan Supreme Court recently decided to change their procedural rules to permit cases on appeal to be handled in this manner. Columnist Brian Dickerson in the Detroit Free Press recently attempted to bring this new practice to the attention of Michigan citizens . The disabled worker is filing a Motion for Re-hearing. The Michigan Trial Lawyers Association, our law firm, and others are joining up with the disabled worker to try to get the Michigan Supreme Court to reconsider its position. It’s not clear how much thought went into the issuance of this Order. Perhaps the Order was the result of confusion or a clerical mistake. Hopefully, the Michigan Supreme Court will grant the worker’s motion for hearing and give this matter a more thorough review. Hopefully, the Michigan Supreme Court did not mean what it suggested and did not intend to use their judicial power to radically gut the workers’ compensation statute by overruling 65 years of legal precedent without even giving injured workers a day in Court.
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