State Compensation Insurance Fund v. Matulich

STURTEVANT, J. On October 4, 1939, Leonard L. Arnold, while in the course of his employment, received personal injuries in an automobile accident. His employer’s [529]compensation insurance carrier, State Compensation Insurance Fund, assumed liability under its policy and has paid and continues to pay compensation to Arnold and to furnish him with hospital and medical attention. On October 3, 1940, the plaintiff, State Compensation Insurance Fund, filed this action against the third parties alleged to be responsible for the injuries to Arnold, to recover from said third parties its expenditures for compensation and hospital and medical treatment, and in its complaint included a claim for the personal injuries sustained by Arnold. Defendants filed a demurrer to that complaint, it was sustained, plaintiff filed an amended complaint, the defendants answered and the cause between the plaintiff and defendants is at issue.

Prior to the filing of the amended complaint, Arnold, the employee, applied for permission to intervene. The record does not disclose that a demurrer was interposed to his application. Both his application and his motion to plead were granted and he filed a complaint May 14, 1941. To that pleading the defendants interposed a general demurrer which pleaded the statute of limitations, subdivision 3 of section 340 of the Code of Civil Procedure. That demurrer was sustained without leave to amend. Thereafter judgment against the intervener was entered in favor of the defendants. From that judgment both the State Compensation Insurance Fund and the plaintiff Arnold have appealed.

This case seems to require a construction of sections 3850-3862 of the Labor Code which apparently have not been construed since the subject matter of said sections was embodied into that code replacing the previously existing statutes relating thereto.

That general subject matter was formerly contained in sections 26 and 26a of the Workmen’s Compensation Act. Those sections were frequently amended and the peculiar wording of said sections and the amendments thereto gave considerable difficulty in practice. When the subject matter of those sections was enacted into the Labor Code, the Legisture again failed to free its enactments from ambiguity and probably made the confusion worse.

Prior to the adoption of the Labor Code, the case of State Compensation Ins. Fund v. Allen, 104 Cal.App. 400 [285 P. 1053], made it clear that under section 26, the insurance carrier could bring an action in its own name to recover its compensation payments and also to recover all