Page:Parish v. Pitts, 244 Ark. 1239 (1968).pdf/14

1252 and sharing this sort of unexpected burden with which we deal in this case". Williams v. City of Detroit, supra. All give weight to the growth of municipal activity.

Municipalities are not the State of Arkansas and do not partake of its constitutionally granted immunity. It does not clearly appear to us that in this day and time the municipality and those presumably benefiting from its services are unable to bear the full cost of these activities. The immunity rule imposing the entire burden of municipal torts on the individual victims is patently unjust and can no longer be retained without an equally clear showing of an even greater harm to the public.

Other courts during the past ten years have, like Arkansas in Kirksey, supra, refused to overturn the rule of governmental immunity, though many have criticized it. Their principal reason for continuing to adhere to an admittedly unjust rule is the doctrine of stare decisis. This policy of adhering to precedent to give predictability to the law, and to avoid unsettling things, is fundamental to the common law. So too is the power to overrule a line of decisions, even those under which property rights were acquired. Carter Oil Co. v. Weil, 209 Ark. 653, 192 S. W. 2d 215 (1946). Precedent governs until it gives a result so patently wrong, so manifestly unjust, that a break becomes unavoidable. Any rule of law not leading to the right result calls for rethinking and perhaps redoing. Llewellyn, Jurisprudence, 217 (1962). The proper limitations on the doctrine of stare decisis have ever been recognized by this Court. "Precedent, it is said, should not implicitly govern, but discretely guide ", Roane v. Hinton, 6 Ark. 525, 527 (1846). Having determined as we have here that a rule established by precedent no longer gives a just result it must then be determined whether the rights of those who have justifiably relied upon the established precedents are of greater weight in this ease than that the rule be corrected. The test is whether it is more important that the matter remain settled than that it be