Beeler v. Van Cannon

HARRIS, Justice.

We reject plaintiff’s equal protection challenge to the legislature’s choice of the effective date for Iowa Code section 668.4 (1985).

In Goetzman v. Wichern, we abolished the common law doctrine of contributory negligence and supplanted it with the doctrine of pure comparative negligence. 327 N.W.2d 742, 754 (Iowa 1982). In so doing we reserved for later case-by-case determination a number of collateral issues which, we thought, could “best be addressed and resolved in the context of concrete cases.” Id.

We soon were called upon to resolve one of the more obvious examples of…