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Oregon Judicial Department Appellate Court Opinions

FILED: October 13, 2004 IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF OREGON MICHAEL GARCIA, Appellant, v. OREGON DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES, CHLOE OUSTERHOUT, BILLIE BROWN, and LORNA YOUNGS, Respondents. 0310007; A124357 En Banc Appeal from Circuit Court, Benton County. Janet Schoenhard Holcomb, Judge. On court's request for information dated May 28, 2004, regarding appealability; taken en banc September 22, 2004. Kent Hickam for appellant. Hardy Myers, Attorney General, Mary H. Williams, Solicitor General, and Richard D. Wasserman, Attorney-in-Charge, for respondents. Before Deits, Chief Judge, and Edmonds, Landau, Haselton, Armstrong, Linder, Wollheim, Brewer, Schuman, and Ortega, Judges. LINDER, J. Jurisdiction determined; appeal may proceed. Brewer, J., dissenting. LINDER, J. This appeal presents what promises to be the first of many questions that will arise for courts in the wake of the enactment of House Bill (HB) 2646 (2003), which comprehensively revised the statutes governing judgments. (1) Under HB 2646, many judgments are now designated "limited," "general," or "supplemental," and trial judges and local court administrators are required to include those designations in judgment labels and in register notations. (2) For the most part, the legislature appears not to have anticipated that the new statutory scheme would be implemented imperfectly--for example, that the labels on judgments might not reflect the new designations or might reflect them incorrectly and that register notations might be incomplete or wrong. Consequently, we are presented with the issue that arises in this case.

file:///C|/Users/Peter/Desktop/Opinions/A124357.htm[4/19/2013 10:08:12 AM]

Oregon Judicial Department Appellate Court Opinions

What happened here is undramatic. The trial judge, after resolving all of the claims in this case, signed and filed a judgment document labeled "general judgment." The judgment document also awarded $385 in costs to the prevailing party. After receiving it, the court administrator noted in the court register that a judgment document had been filed. In making that notation, however, the court administrator made a mistake. Rather than describe the judgment as a general judgment, the court administrator described it as a limited judgment. (3) The question under HB 2646 is the following: Does that clerical error defeat our jurisdiction over the appeal? (4) The answer requires untangling the new statutory scheme governing judgments and attempting to discern the legislature's intent on a question that it did not address expressly. The starting point, as for all questions that require us to determine legislative intent, is the text and context of the pertinent statutes. PGE v. Bureau of Labor and Industries, 317 Or 606, 610-11, 859 P2d 1143 (1993). Context, in turn, includes "the preexisting common law and the statutory framework within which the law was enacted." Denton and Denton, 326 Or 236, 241, 951 P2d 693 (1998) (citation omitted). Because significant features of the preexisting statutory framework relating to judgments were retained in HB 2646, that framework provides an appropriate starting point. Under the preexisting law, for a judgment to be enforceable and appealable, two basic requirements of form had to be satisfied: (1)the judgment decision had to be set forth in a written document, and (2) the written document had to be labeled a "judgment." Former ORCP 70 (2001), repealed by Or Laws 2003, ch 576,

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