Rogers v. Donovan

TONGUE, J.,

specially concurring.

I concur with the result reached by the majority, but not with its reasoning. It is a “familiar rule of statutory construction” that “[e]ommon law terms used in statutes are presumed to have been used in their common law sense.”① It does not necessarily follow, however, as suggested by the majority, that whenever the legislature adopts a statute on a matter which is the subject of a common law rule, this court can first declare that the legislature intended to adopt the common law rule and then “read into” the statute “a restriction not mentioned in the…