In a 5-2 opinion released July 29, 2024, the Michigan Supreme Court upheld its own authority to extend litigation filing deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The plaintiff in Carter v. DTN Management Company, Karen Carter, slipped and fell in January 2018 and filed her lawsuit in April 2021, which would have been untimely under normal circumstances due to the three-year statute of limitations. As it happened, though, Carter’s normal three-year window included the 101-day period in which the Supreme Court’s Administrative Order (AO) 2020-3 was in effect. That order effectively suspended all filing deadlines. When the court issued AO 2020-18 to repeal AO 2020-3, it also ordered that those 101 days still would not count in calculating statutory deadlines; it effectively eliminated those days from the calendar for purposes of computing deadlines. The trial court dismissed the case as time barred. The Court of Appeals reversed, holding the administrative orders were constitutional and thus extended the filing deadline. The Michigan Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals, ruling that the administrative orders were a constitutional exercise of the court's authority.
The issue dividing the two sides of the case was the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches of state government — specifically, the nature of statutes of limitation and the extent of judicial power. The court has recently ruled — and reaffirmed in this opinion — that statutes of limitation are substantive laws, which place them within the province of the legislative branch. Courts do not have the power to rewrite the deadlines established by those laws.
But the Supreme Court does have power to establish procedural rules for how state courts operate and administer their legal duties. AO 2020-3 and AO 2020-18, it held, were procedural rules about how to calculate the number of days, not substantive rules that changed the number of days within a limitations period. The former type of rule applies equally to all parties in a lawsuit, the court said, while the latter is determined by the behavior of only one party.
For two of the court’s seven justices, this hair-splitting was too fine. They dissented from the ruling and would have found AO 2020-3 and AO 2020-18 unconstitutional exercises of legislative powers. This is despite the fact that they both approved the orders’ adoption in 2020. As they have in other COVID-19-related cases, these justices explained that “time and reflection—which we did not have in abundance when the orders were issued—has revealed that we were wrong.” Rather than dismissing Carter’s lawsuit outright, however, these justices would have remanded for consideration of whether her reliance on their order amounted to equitable tolling of her deadline.
On its surface, this ruling is mostly a historical relic of a time we all hope to never repeat. The fact that a majority of the court characterized its extension of deadlines as procedural rather than substantive, however, raises the possibility that it will be open to similar interpretations of other deadlines and procedural rules in future cases.
If you have additional questions or concerns about the Carter case or any other litigation matter, feel free to contact Brian Wassom, Gaëtan Gerville-Réache or any member of Warner’s Appellate and Supreme Court Practice Group.
