The Court ruled the deadline for filing a lawsuit against the physician who moved out of state can be extended.

The Court ruled the deadline for filing a lawsuit against the physician who moved out of state can be extended.

Because a doctor being sued for malpractice moved out of state, the deadline for filing a lawsuit against the physician was extended under a prior version of state law, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled today.

A Supreme Court majority found the Ohio “tolling statute ” allowed for more time to file a lawsuit while a person remains out of state. Dr. Sataya Acharya argued the law violated her federal constitutional rights when she moved to Pennsylvania to practice medicine. By living and working out of state, she would remain subject to being sued in Ohio for malpractice as long as she continued to live out of state, while doctors living in Ohio can only be sued up to four years after providing medical care, she argued.

Writing for the Court majority, Justice Melody Stewart explained that the Eleventh District Court of Appeals sided with Acharya by finding the statute, R.C. 2305.15, violated the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution because it unlawfully burdened interstate commerce. Justice Stewart wrote that the law was constitutional under a balancing test crafted by the U.S. Supreme Court because the statute’s benefits outweighed the burden it places on medical providers who move.

Justice Stewart noted the General Assembly has amended the tolling statute, and as of October 2024, the new law applies differently to lawsuits filed against those who leave the state.

Justices Patrick F. Fischer, R. Patrick DeWine, Jennifer Brunner, and Joseph T. Deters joined Justice Stewart’s opinion. Chief Justice Sharon L. Kennedy concurred in judgment only.

Justice Michael P. Donnelly dissented and stated he would dismiss the appeal as having been improvidently accepted.

Nursing Home, Doctor Sued for Substandard Care
Donald Gerres was a patient at Western Reserve Senior Care. He died in the facility in October 2013. In September 2014, Claudia Kennedy, as the executor of Gerres’ estate, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Western Reserve in Portage County Common Pleas Court. She alleged that the substandard medical care provided by the facility, Acharya, and others caused Gerres’ death.

Kennedy voluntarily dismissed the case in January 2019 and refiled it in 2020. The healthcare providers asked the trial court to dismiss the case, arguing a “statute of repose” prevented a lawsuit on medical claims after four years from the alleged medical error.

Kennedy argued that because she originally filed her lawsuit against the providers within the four-year repose period, another state law allowed her to refile the case up to a year after voluntarily dismissing the action. The trial court agreed and allowed the case to move forward. As the case was pending, the Supreme Court of Ohio issued a decision in another case, which found a medical claim could only be filed within the four-year time limit and could not be extended by dismissing and then refiling the case.

The trial court agreed that the Supreme Court decision limited Kennedy’s right to continue the case and dismissed it. Kennedy appealed to the Eleventh District. She argued the four-year statute of repose did not apply to Acharya. Under R.C. 2305.15(A), there is an exception to the absolute four-year limit when a “person is out of the state, has absconded, or conceals self.” Since Acharya moved to Pennsylvania after Gerres’ death, the refiled lawsuit in 2020 was valid because Acharya was not living in Ohio at that time, putting the four-year deadline for filing on hold, Kennedy claimed.

The Eleventh District found that because Acharya left the state for a legitimate business purpose, the tolling statute violated the doctor’s federal constitutional rights. The appeals court cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1988 Bendix Autolite Corp. v. Midwestco Ents. Inc. decision, which found the Ohio tolling statute unconstitutional as applied to an out-of-state corporation because it impermissibly burdened interstate commerce.

Kennedy appealed to the Supreme Court of Ohio, which agreed to consider whether the tolling statute was constitutional when applied to Acharya, a doctor who moved out of the state to practice medicine in another state.

Supreme Court Analyzed Law’s Constitutionality
Justice Stewart explained the commerce clause gives Congress the exclusive power to regulate interstate commerce. With that power comes the implicit limit on the rights of states to enact laws that impair interstate commerce. This is known as the “dormant commerce clause.” The dormant commerce clause prohibits state laws that protect in-state businesses at the expense of out-of-state competitors, the opinion noted.

The U.S. Supreme Court set up a two-part test to determine whether a state law violates the dormant commerce clause. If the law discriminates against out of state commerce as written, or if it was enacted with purposeful discrimination in mind, it is invalid. If a law only has “indirect effects” on interstate commerce, then a court must apply a balancing test. Under the test, a law will be upheld unless the burden on interstate commerce clearly outweighs the law’s local benefit, the Court explained.

The opinion noted that courts have struggled to apply the two-part test, and the U.S. Supreme Court clarified in a 2023 ruling how it should be applied. That decision was released four months after the Eleventh District sided with Acharya. One key point explained that the balancing test determines if a state law that seemingly applies equally to in-state and out-of-state interests actually has a “discriminatory purpose.”

The Court analyzed the reason the tolling statute was enacted in the first place, noting Ohio enacted the law in 1810 when states had no jurisdiction to bring into court a person who was not physically present within the state. While in time, other laws have been adopted to reach out-of-state actors who allegedly committed wrongs in Ohio but have left the state, Ohio has continued to retain the tolling statute. The opinion explained the law’s local benefit is to extend the time to file a lawsuit against an out-of-state person because of the difficulties serving the lawsuit to someone in another state.

“Nothing in the history of the tolling statute suggests that its enactment was motivated by a desire to undertake state economic protectionism; rather ‘Ohio passed the law to address a quaint problem – that plaintiffs at one point in American legal history had no authority to pull out-of-state individuals into the jurisdiction to defend a lawsuit,’” the opinion stated.

The Court found the tolling statute may have an impact on those such as Acharya who move to another state, but the law is not unconstitutional unless it imposes a substantial burden on interstate commerce. Acharya’s case is not similar to Bendix, the Court stated. In Bendix, the tolling statute was found to treat out-of-state corporations differently and would have forced companies to have an agent in Ohio to have the same protections as an Ohio company, the opinion explained.

Archarya is not a business, regularly trading goods and services across state lines for profit, but rather is a physician who provides medical services in any state she chooses, the Court noted. The burden on Acharya to potentially face a lawsuit where she previously practiced is not outweighed by the law’s local benefit to assist in serving lawsuits on those who moved out of state, the Court concluded.

The Court remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings.

2023-0372. Kennedy v. W. Res. Senior Care, Slip Opinion No. 2024-Ohio-5565.

View oral argument video of this case.

Please note: Opinion summaries are prepared by the Office of Public Information for the general public and news media. Opinion summaries are not prepared for every opinion, but only for noteworthy cases. Opinion summaries are not to be considered as official headnotes or syllabi of court opinions. The full text of this and other court opinions are available online.

PDF files may be viewed, printed, and searched using the free Acrobat^® Reader
Acrobat Reader is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated.