Hear From the
SCD President

Hi everyone. Appellate decisions reflect our history and the evolution of law in Hawaii. Leafing through old law books can reveal interesting situations not encountered today. Three random examples illustrate the variety of cases you can find:

Ferrage v. Honolulu Rapid Transit & Land Co., 24 Haw. 87 (1917) involved a collision between a streetcar and an automobile at the intersection of Fort Street and Merchant Street. The streetcar was speeding at 18 to 20 miles per hour when it should have been going 8. The Plaintiff was a taxi operator who had been asked to take an injured man from the vicinity of Victoria street to the emergency hospital. The taxi driver went down Merchant Street at 30 mph, but blew his horn constantly the entire way like an ambulance. Just as the streetcar passed the Castle and Cooke Building into the intersection, the Plaintiff crashed into the streetcar. Contributory negligence law at the time denied the driver of the taxi any recovery.

In Territory v. Kraft, 33 Haw. 397 (1935), an amateur photographer was found guilty of selling photos without a license, and fined $7.50. The Court explained: “On the 7th day of August, 1934, Theodore Roosevelt Lilly filed in the district court of Honolulu a verified information alleging in substance that Fritz Kraft, on the 27th day of July, 1934, for hire and reward and without having complied with the provisions of Act 103, L. 1933 . . ., took certain photographs of a group including Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, and Joseph B. Poindexter, governor of the Territory of Hawaii, while they were visiting the Shriners' Hospital for crippled children in Honolulu and sold the same for thirty-five cents a copy.” The photographer won on appeal: “it is our conclusion that Act 103, in so far as it prohibits those who have not passed an examination and received an official certificate from practicing or holding themselves out as competent to practice photography for profit in the Territory of Hawaii, is an unconstitutional encroachment upon the liberty of the citizen to choose and pursue an innocent occupation.”

On December 7, 1941, Tuck Lee Pang, a Honolulu Fireman stationed at Hickam Field, was killed as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor. An insurance company refused to pay “double indemnity” on Fireman Pang’s life insurance policy (double the face value of the policy) on the basis that his death resulted from war, which was excluded from double indemnity coverage. In Ching Pang v. Sun Life Assurance Co., 37 Haw. 208 (1945), the Hawaii Supreme Court held that there was a difference between a “state of war” and “acts of war,” and that a “state of war” did not exist on December 7, 1941, and did not come into existence until December 8, 1941 at 4:20 P.M. E.S.T., when Congress approved a formal declaration of war. Fireman Pang’s beneficiary therefore was entitled to double the face value of the life insurance policy. Enjoy our legal history.