Justia New Jersey Supreme Court Opinion Summaries

T.T., individually and on behalf of her three-year-old daughter, A.T., filed this medical malpractice action seeking damages from a hospital and several medical professionals for injuries caused during the child’s birth.1 The trial court granted summary judgment to defendants and dismissed the action with prejudice because plaintiff failed to serve a timely affidavit of merit. The Appellate Division affirmed, rejecting plaintiff’s argument that the circumstances should have supported entry of a dismissal without prejudice under Rule 4:37-1(b). After review, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the grant of summary judgment to defendants and remanded for further proceedings. The Court determined that a combination of circumstances (not the least of which was the failure to schedule a pretrial conference to address the affidavit of merit requirement as New Jersey case law directed), warranted allowing the untimely affidavit to be filed. "The equities militate in favor of permitting a facially meritorious action to proceed here, particularly because any prejudice to defendants may be addressed through costs imposed by the trial court. We decline to approve recourse to a voluntary dismissal without prejudice under Rule 4:37-1(b) as an appropriate avenue for addressing failures to comply with the affidavit of merit requirement, including when a minor is involved. Rather, we will require modification of the Judiciary’s electronic filing and notification case management system to ensure that, going forward, necessary and expected conferences are scheduled to enhance parties’ compliance with requirements under the Affidavit of Merit Statute (AMS or the statute), N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-26 to -29, in furtherance of the statutory policy goals." View "A.T. v. Cohen" on Justia Law

This appeal arose out of the tragic death of eleven-year-old Abiah Jones after she fell from a ride in an amusement park. The issues this case presented for the New Jersey Supreme Court’s consideration was: (1) the circumstances under which a defendant is barred from asserting contribution and common-law indemnification claims against a public entity for purposes of the Tort Claims Act; (2) whether the jury should be permitted to allocate a percentage of fault to a public entity pursuant to the Comparative Negligence Act and the Joint Tortfeasors Contribution Law; and (3) the effect of any such allocation of fault on plaintiffs recovery of damages if the jury returns a verdict in their favor. The Supreme Court reversed the trial court’s determination. The plain language of N.J.S.A.59:8-8 required parties seeking to assert a claim against a public entity to serve a notice of claim within ninety days of the date on which the cause of action accrues. Because the Morey defendants did not serve a timely notice of claim on the Association, their third-party contribution and common-law indemnification claims against the Association are barred. The New Jersey Supreme Court held that the trial court should have afforded defendants an opportunity to present evidence of negligence, that negligence was a proximate cause of Abiah Jones’s death. If defendants present prima facie evidence, the trial court should instruct the jury to determine whether any fault should be allocated in accordance with N.J.S.A.2A:15-5.2. Should the jury find negligence was a proximate cause of Abiah Jones’s death, the trial court should mold any judgment entered in plaintiffs’ favor pursuant to N.J.S.A.2A:15-5.2(d) to reduce the damages awarded to plaintiffs by the percentage of fault that the jury allocates. View "Jones v. Morey Pier, Inc." on Justia Law

Plaintiffs Tamar and Ari Ginsberg, now New Jersey residents, lived in New York during Tamar's pregnancy and at the time of the birth of their daughter, Abigail. Abigail tragically died from Tay-Sachs disease, a genetically inherited, incurable neurological disorder, at the age of three. Plaintiffs sued a New York laboratory owned and operated by defendant Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (Quest), a New Jersey-based medical testing company, alleging failure to provide correct blood test results when Ari sought to determine whether he was a Tay-Sachs carrier. Quest, in turn, asserted a third-party claim against Mount Sinai Medical Center, Inc., a New York hospital, which allegedly tested Ari's blood sample in New York pursuant to its contract with Quest. Plaintiffs also sued several New Jersey-domiciled defendants whom they alleged to have provided plaintiff Tamar with negligent advice and treatment in New Jersey. The issue this case presented for the New Jersey Supreme Court's review in this interlocutory appeal was whether the choice-of-law principles set forth in 146, 145, and 6 of the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws (1971) should have been applied uniformly to all defendants in a given case, or whether courts should undertake a defendant-by-defendant choice-of-law analysis when the defendants are domiciled in different states. Although the appellate panel agreed that New Jersey and New York law diverged in material respects, it concluded that New York constituted the place of injury because it was the state of plaintiffs' domicile during Tamar's pregnancy, the state in which prenatal testing would have been conducted and the pregnancy would likely have been terminated, and the state in which Abigail was born. The panel then considered the contacts set forth in Restatement 145 and the principles stated in Restatement 6 to determine whether New Jersey had a more significant relationship to the parties and the issues than New York. The panel rejected the trial court's assumption that the law of a single state must govern all of the issues in this lawsuit and instead undertook separate choice-of-law analyses for the New Jersey and New York defendants. The panel found that the presumption in favor of New York law was overcome with regard to the New Jersey defendants, but not with regard to Quest and Mount Sinai. Finding no reversible error in the appellate court's decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed. View "Ginsberg v. Quest Diagnostics, Inc." on Justia Law