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 Latest Important Cases The New York Workmen’s Compensation Act Declared Unconstitutional

workmen’s Compensation.

Em

ployer Cannot be Made Liable in Absence of Fault —— Due Process of Law -——Limits of the Police Power N. Y.

N

Ives v. South Buﬂalo

Railway

Company,1 decided March 24, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously

held the compulsory workmen’s com pensation act of New York (article 140 of the Labor Law, being chapter 674, Laws of 1910) unconstitutional.

tion making the employer’s fault no longer an element of the employee's

right of action carried with it the abrogation of the doctrines of common

employment, contributory negligence and assumption of risks. “There can be no doubt that the ﬁrst two of these are subjects clearly and fully within the scope of legislative power. . . . . These doctrines, for they are nothing more, may be regulated or even abol

ished.I This is true to a limited extent

The statute in question applies to speciﬁed dangerous employments, and gives the employee the right to recover a ﬁxed scale of compensation for all personal injuries, without proof of negligence on the part of the employer,

which are not caused "in whole or in part by the serious and wilful mis conduct of the workman." Werner, ]., who wrote the opinion,

began by giving a brief review of the

as to the assumption of risk by the

employee.

In the Labor Law and the

Employers’ Liability Act, which deﬁne

the risks assumed by the employee, there are many provisions which cast upon the employer a great variety of

duties and burdens unknown to the common law. These can doubtless be still further multiplied and extended to the point where they deprive the em

ployer of rights guaranteed to him by circumstances under which the Wain wright law came to be enacted, and of some of the arguments of the Wain

our Constitutions, and there, of course,

regard all economic, philosophical and

they must stop." Constitutional. objections to the act based on limitations of the reserved power to alter or amend corporate

moral theories, attractive and desirable

charters, the alleged unfair classiﬁca

though they may be, as subordinate to the primary question whether they can be moulded into statutes without infringing upon the letter or spirit of our written constitutions." The Court then said that an innova

tion of employments, right to jury trial,

wright commission.

"Under our form

of government, however, courts must

' Reported in 45 New York Law Journal 23. 41 (Apr. 34), 43 Chicago Legal New: 273 (Apr. 8).

were

then

considered,

and

brushed

aside as either not tenable or not ' While the modiﬁmtion of the contributory negligence rule is within the legislative power, its complete abolition would carry with it such a far reaching transformation of the law of negligence, and would so alter the situation of existing rights of action. that it may be questioned whether the Court realized the full import of this dictum. —Ed.