How does originalism work with state constitutions? Justice Clint Bolick, writing for the Arizona Supreme Court, has shown the way in Matthews v. Industrial Commission of Arizona, a worker’s compensation case raising state constitutional issues.[1]

By way of background, Arizona’s constitution expressly requires the legislature to enact a workers’ compensation law that covers injuries occurring in accidents that are a necessary risk of employment.[2] Included in the state’s current workers’ compensation law is a provision allowing recovery for a “mental injury” that is the result of “some unexpected, unusual or extraordinary stress related to the employment.”[3]

The constitutional issue in this case was whether the statute violates the state constitution by restricting recovery for mental injury to situations involving extraordinary stress, whereas the workers’ compensation clause covers injuries arising from accidents that are more typical.

The case arose out of a workers’ compensation claim brought by a police officer for post-traumatic stress disorder. The plaintiff, Officer Timothy Matthews, had twice witnessed gruesome and violent events while serving as an officer, and after the second, he filed a claim for mental injury.[4] During a hearing before an administrative law judge, testimony showed that officers routinely see similar things to what Officer Matthews had seen.[5] One officer called them “standard issue.”[6] Because of this, the judge denied Matthews’ claim because his injury was not “unexpected, unusual or extraordinary.”[7]

On appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court, Matthews argued that the statute’s modifier “unexpected, unusual or extraordinary” was a restriction forbidden by the constitution’s workers’ compensation clause, which refers only to “necessary risk[s] or danger[s]” of employment.[8] But this raised a preliminary question: what coverage does the constitution require?

The Arizona Constitution requires coverage for “injuries” caused by “accident,” but it does not define those terms. Accordingly, the court conducted an originalist analysis of the meanings of both. The court explained that it was bound to discover and apply the original public meaning, and it rejected the idea that it could divine the “spirit” of a constitutional provision and give it effect.[9]

The court began its examination of the original public meaning “with dictionary definitions from the time the provision was adopted [in 1912].”[10] These definitions, it held, can be supplemented with corpus linguistics, “a massive database that enables date-specific searches for the possible, common, and most common uses of words or phrases as they were used in newspapers, books, magazines, and other popular publications.”[11]

Reviewing those sources, the court concluded that “injury” at the time of ratification did not include mental injuries.[12] Additionally, “accident” referred to unexpected or unforeseen events.[13] Accordingly, the court held that “the original, plain meaning of injury by accident requires more than the ordinary stresses presented by a specific job, but rather an unexpected event resulting in tangible physical harm.”[14]

The court rejected Matthews’ invitation to update the constitution to reflect that the public’s understanding of injury by accident “has evolved over time.”[15] The power to do that, the court explained, “resides exclusively in the people and their elected representatives, not the courts.”[16]

The court also rejected the dissent’s argument that the court should look not at 1912, when the workers’ compensation clause was adopted, but at 1925, when it was amended.[17] Those amendments, however, did not change the injury-by-accident language, and “[w]hen a subsequent enactment imports unchanged earlier language, it imports the original meaning as well.”[18]

For these reasons, the court affirmed the denial of Matthews’ claim.[19]

In a solo dissent, Vice Chief Justice Ann Timmer argued that the court should have interpreted “injury” broadly and that it should have taken a more expansive reading of early 1900s dictionaries.[20] She also called into question the legitimacy of using corpus linguistics because “[t]he majority does not provide sufficient information about the corpus linguistics database to comfortably conclude it represents an adequate number and variety of publications.”[21] Nevertheless, she picked a handful of sources from it that, she argued, showed that the general public was familiar with the concept of mental injuries.[22] She also argued that early sources showed that the definition of “accident” included expected mishaps.[23]

The case is noteworthy because both the majority and dissent put originalist tools to work in interpreting their state constitution, and they confined their disagreements to the appropriate way to use those tools. Critically, no justices argued that the court should, or even could, rewrite or update the constitution as they saw fit.

 

[1] No. CV-21-0192-PR (Ariz., Nov. 23, 2022).

[2] Ariz. Const. art. 18, § 8.

[3] A.R.S. § 23-1043.01(B) (West).

[4] Matthews, No. CV-21-0192-PR, at *3.

[5] Id. at *3–4.

[6] Id. at *4.

[7] Id.

[8] Id. at *9.

[9] Id. at *10 (citing Antonin Scalia & Brian A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 344 (2012)).

[10] Id.

[11] Id. (citing Thomas R. Lee & Stephen C. Mouritsen, Judging Ordinary Meaning, 127 Yale L.J. 788 (2018)).

[12] Id. at *11.

[13] Id. at *12.

[14] Id. at *14.

[15] Id.

[16] Id.

[17] Id. at *12.

[18] Id. (citing Scalia & Garner, supra note 9).

[19] The court unanimously rejected out of hand a state constitutional equal protection claim, which is not addressed here given its cursory treatment.

[20] Id. at *17.

[21] Id. at *18.

[22] Id. at *19–20.

[23] Id. at *22–23.

Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. We welcome responses to the views presented here. To join the debate, please email us at [email protected].