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
