"This Court may affirm the judgment of the trial court upon any valid legal ground even if that ground was not argued before or considered by, and even if it was rejected by, the trial court."
How later courts described this case
- "This Court may affirm the judgment of the trial court upon any valid legal ground even if that ground was not argued before or considered by, and even if it was rejected by, the trial court."
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
SHAW, Justice
(concurring in the result).
I agree that the petition for the writ of mandamus should be denied. I write to note the following.
*421 The issue whether State-agent immunity applies may at times rely heavily on the facts of the case. Thus, the course of discovery may reveal new evidence or factors that show that a previously denied motion for a summary judgment was premature. A second or renewed motion for a summary judgment may be necessary to present that evidence or those factors to the trial court; the trial court, as noted in the main opinion, is free to consider such a motion. In that scenario, I see no barrier to this Court’s reviewing a second petition for writ of mandamus challenging the denial of such second or renewed motion, and I see nothing in the main opinion contrary to that notion.
In the instant matter, the second or renewed motion for a summary judgment raised no new significant factual or legal arguments differing from the first motion: it was, for all intents and purposes, the same motion. The trial court’s denial was the same denial challenged in the previous untimely petition for a writ of mandamus. I do not believe that the petitioner has demonstrated that the trial court in this case had the “imperative duty” to grant a summary-judgment motion that, in essence, it had already considered and rejected. I thus agree that this Court is not required to address the underlying merits of the instant petition.