Law Commons^™

Comment, Robert E. Keeton

Vanderbilt Law Review

Part of the price we pay for a system wisely dedicated to even-handed justice under law is that courts often fail to identify those exceptional cases in which the highest aims of the system are served rather than threatened by a judicial break with precedent. Thus it happens that in the long, slow story of law reform, a recent case in the Illinois courts raised hopes for a rare and distinctive breakthrough. In Maki v. Frelk, responding to an invitation from the state's supreme court to reexamine the well entrenched rule that contributory negligence of an injured person is a …