Florida Greyhound v. West Flagler Assoc.

• Decision Date: 21 April 1977
• Docket Number: No. 50128,50128
• Citation: 347 So.2d 408
• Parties: FLORIDA GREYHOUND OWNERS & BREEDERS ASSOCIATION, INC., etc., et al., Petitioners, v. WEST FLAGLER ASSOCIATES, LTD., etc., et al., Respondents.
• Court: Florida Supreme Court

Page 408

347 So.2d 408

FLORIDA GREYHOUND OWNERS & BREEDERS ASSOCIATION, INC., etc., et al., Petitioners, v. WEST FLAGLER ASSOCIATES, LTD., etc., et al., Respondents.

No. 50128.

Supreme Court of Florida.

April 21, 1977.

Donald G. MacKenzie of MacKenzie & MacKenzie, Bruce W. Greer of Pettigrew, Arky, Freed, Stearns, Watson & Greer, for petitioners.

Herbert L. Nadeau of Patton, Kanner, Nadeau, Segal, Zeller & LaPorte, Miami, Sibley, Giblin, Levenson & Ward, Miami Beach, Aubrey V. Kendall, George W. Wright, Jr., of Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwody & Cole, Miami, L. Robert Frank of Allen, Dell, Frank & Trinkle, Tampa, John A. Rush, Arthur T. Boone, Jacksonville, Robert L. Floyd, James D. Little of Frates, Floyd, Pearson, Stewart, Richman & Greer, Miami, for respondents.

The Petition for Writ of Certiorari reflected probable jurisdiction in this Court. We issued the Writ and have heard argument of the parties. After hearing argument and upon further consideration of the matter, we have determined that the Court is without jurisdiction. Therefore, the Writ must be and is hereby discharged and the Petition for Writ of Certiorari is dismissed.

It is so ordered.

ADKINS, BOYD and KARL, JJ., concur.

ENGLAND, J., concurs with opinion in which OVERTON, C. J., concurs.

OVERTON, C. J., concurs specially with opinion.

ENGLAND, Justice, concurring.

I tentatively voted to accept jurisdiction in this case based on an apparent conflict between the decision below and other Florida appellate decisions. I had thought from the jurisdictional filings that the decision below, which without discussion affirmed an order of the trial court dismissing one count of petitioners' amended counterclaim, was in conflict with such decisions as Napolitano v. H. L. Robertson & Assoc., Inc., 311 So.2d 757 (Fla.3d DCA 1975), and Sarasota-Manatee Airport Auth. v. Alderman, 238 So.2d 678 (Fla.2d DCA 1970). ¹ These cases generally involve the right to a jury trial for a counterclaim which contains both legal and equitable aspects. I now believe that the conflict I initially perceived is not present.

To find decisional conflict in this case, it was necessary to scrutinize the second count of petitioners' second amended counterclaim, which alleged a violation of the anti-trust laws, to ascertain whether it asserted a right to the alleged "legal" claim of damages. After carefully examining that pleading I could not say with any certainty that petitioners had requested damages, as opposed to an avoidance of an underlying contract. I gave petitioners the benefit of the doubt. Still, it was then necessary to determine whether the district court's affirmance of a dismissal of that counterclaim count had generated a "real and embarassing" conflict in the jurisprudence of this state. ² After pondering this question for some time, I not only concluded that no jurisprudential conflict was present, but I further concluded that the inquiry itself was wasteful and improvident.

In AB CTC v. Morejon, 324 So.2d 625 (Fla.1975), I wrote in dissent that the time had arrived to reconsider Foley v. Weaver Drugs, Inc., 177 So.2d 221 (Fla.1965), the divided decision of this Court (4-3) which granted us the authority to review district court decisions rendered without opinion. This case crystallizes my evolving concern and leads me to conclude that the time has indeed come to recede from Foley and its ill-conceived attempt to retain the last word on every matter brought to the Florida appellate courts.

Immediately after the district courts of appeal were created in 1957, this Court evaluated their constitutional role in a series of unanimous opinions which, in general, resulted in their characterization as courts of final rather than intermediate appellate jurisdiction. ³ In one of the earliest decisions Ansin v. Thurston, 101 So.2d 808 (Fla.1958) the Court dealt with the exception to district court finality which occurs when one of their decisions is in "direct conflict" with other Florida appellate precedents, announcing that the Constitution is concerned only "with decisions as precedents as opposed to adjudications of the rights of particular litigants." ⁴ This fundamental evaluation of the new court system in Florida, which was made contemporaneously with the constitutional change that brought the district courts into being, was amplified in Lake v. Lake, 103 So.2d 639 (Fla.1958), to mean that a district court's decision was not reviewable as a matter of "conflict" jurisdiction unless, with only "conceivable" exceptions, a direct conflict appeared on the face of the opinion. The Court there refused to be immersed in the record of the case in an attempt to discover some conflict which might lurk behind a district court's unexplained decision. Later that same year, in Seaboard Air Line R. R. v. Branham, 104 So.2d 356, 358 (Fla.1958), a unanimous Court announced the procedure it would follow when asked to review decisions of the district courts for "conflict":

"The Court will examine the opinion upon which the district court of appeal decision is based, and if the opinion, on its face, shows the probable existence of a direct conflict between the two decisions, on the same point of law, the writ of certiorari may issue and, after study, may be discharged, or the decision of the district court of appeal may be quashed or modified to the end that any direct conflict between the decisions on the same point of law may be reconciled." (emphasis in original)

Despite these clear pronouncements of law, the bar of this state refused to accept the finality of district court decisions. ⁵ Apparently from the intensity of repeated assaults on district court decisions and a perceived need to rectify what appeared to be an occasional error in their decisions, this Court began to depart from the principles it had so carefully forged. ⁶ Generally, however, the Court remained resolute. See Kyle v. Kyle, 139 So.2d 885 (Fla.1962).

With the decisional armor once chinked, however, the defense of fortress "finality" became increasingly untenable. First, a procedure was developed to pry open inscrutable decisions of the district courts to see what was really behind them. To do this the Court began to examine per curiam affirmances in the light of concurring and dissenting opinions and by that means examine the cause for injustice. In its first phases cases would be remanded to the district courts if the possibility of conflict existed, and the courts were requested to write an opinion explaining the action of the majority. ⁷ These later-developed opinions would then be used to determine if there existed a conflict in precedents. Within a few years this remand-for-opinion procedure became reflexive. ⁸ The stage was then set for a constitutional struggle between the fledgling district courts and a prevailing majority on this Court, as to whether the early promises of finality were more than mere rhetoric.

Rising to the defense of the district courts' finality in Foley v. Weaver Drugs, Inc., 172 So.2d 907 (Fla.3d DCA 1965), the Third District Court of Appeal refused to write an opinion for this Court's benefit. The Court's reaction came in a sharply divided decision (4-3) holding that jurisdiction exists here if any conflict can be found in the "record proper". Foley v. Weaver Drugs, Inc., 177 So.2d 221 (Fla.1965). Mr. Justice Thornal vigorously dissented, noting that the Foley majority never came to grips with the important constitutional considerations involved in so vast a broadening of the Court's jurisdiction. In fact, the only constitutionally relevant basis for the Foley majority was the suggestion that a per curiam affirmance without opinion creates an effective precedent in the trial court being affirmed. For so minor a premise, so significant a consequence!

In my view, the premise articulated by the Foley majority is in all events manifestly unsound. It is based on the indefensible assumption that trial judges assume that district courts issue per curiam affirmances only when they agree with the trial judge's reasons for ruling a certain way. That assumption is not only fallacious as a matter of simple logic, but it has, since Foley, been expressly rejected by the district courts themselves. Both the Second and Third District Courts of Appeal have expressly stated that trial judges can make no assumptions as to the basis on which a per curiam affirmance without opinion is rendered. ⁹ And this Court has also stated that reasons expressed by a trial judge, although part of the "record proper", are irrelevant when we consider whether we have jurisdiction to review a district court's per curiam affirmance. ¹⁰ Since Foley, as I have attempted to point out, ¹¹ the district courts have more and more been regarded by a majority of this Court simply as inconvenient rungs on the appellate ladder. The high cost of Foley in dollars and time to litigants and to the judiciary of Florida now demands that the majority decision there be reconsidered. My own conviction is that Foley should be scrapped, along with the stillborn traces of decisional control which were conceived in the Lake decision. ¹² To my mind, there is no possible way that a district court's affirmance without opinion can create decisional disharmony in the jurisprudence of this state sufficient to warrant our attention. ¹³ The foul assumption which underlies any review is that the district court perpetrated an injustice which it could not explain away in an opinion. I refuse to indulge that assumption.

An honest analysis by my colleagues would compel them to admit that decisional conflict in this class of cases exists today solely on the grounds that we say it does. ¹⁴ This is, of course, contrary to our recognition that the reasons for the district courts' decisions in such cases are not capable of being discovered. The only rationale for our continued search of a basis for review in non-opinion decisions, then,...