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The Editor’s Bag

WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION HE atmosphere has been clearing

since the New York Court of Appeals rendered its decision declaring the compulsory workmen's compensation statute of 1910 unconstitutional. We confess to having received a shock of

injured employee was given the right to elect of which remedy he would avail himself, whether his remedy for damages under the law of negligence or for compensation under the statute, the employer was given no corresponding right, but must accept whichever lia

bility the workman forced upon him.

surprise that a law drafted upon similar

It seems to us that justice requires

principles to the English statute should be unanimously set aside by a court which

equal rights on both sides. If workmen's

in ability and prestige is at least the equal of any state tribunal in the country. Upon reﬂection, however, we became convinced that the New York statute was properly to be viewed as conﬁscatory, and that the Court

compensation is to be elective as regards the employee, it should also be elective as regards the employer. If it is to be compulsory with reference to one of the parties, it should likewise be compulsory

with respect to the other.

Otherwise

there is a discrimination inconsistent

reached the right result, though by a process of reasoning which might be

with the letter and spirit of our constitu tions.

open to criticism in some particulars. It seems, for example, as if the Court had not given due recognition to the extremely broad scope of the police power, and the common law doctrines of negligence had been treated with undue reverence. It would have been possible, however, for the Court to view these matters somewhat in the

The English act, like the New York statute, unfairly discriminates in favor

adopted

same light as the Appellate Division,

tolerance shown toward it by the English

whose decision it reversed, without reaching a different conclusion as to constitutionality. For the statute was

bar? Simply by the fact that the English Constitution is not, like our own, a system of delicately contrived checks and balances, and the will of Parliament being supreme, the enact ment of class legislation is sometimes inevitable, and resistance on such occa sions futile. The English example affords no argument for the constitu

so drawn as to be open to the objection of being a clear case of class legislation of a particularly unjust type. To state the situation brieﬂy, the in justice of the New York statute lay,

in our judgment, in the fact while the

of the employee by permitting him to elect remedies and allowing the employer no similar advantage. As Professor Dicey has said, it “has all the earmarks

of collectivism." How, then, explain the readiness with which it has been into

English

law,

and

the