Court Opinion

ID: 9649125
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:42:59.880959+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:07.897045
License: Public Domain

CLIFFORD and SCHREIBER, JJ.,
dissenting.
For some time now we have sought to persuade the Court to adopt this rule of law: when a plaintiff in personal injury litigation, prior to the expiration of the two-year time limit of the statute of limitations, N.J.S.A. 2A:14-2, discovers or reasonably should discover those facts that the law equates with a cause of action, he must proceed with reasonable diligence to bring suit within so much of the two-year period as remains unexpired. This rule would give a plaintiff the benefit of an “expanded” statute of limitations only upon a showing that under the particular circumstances he had insufficient time expeditiously to file his complaint between discovery and expiration of the statutory period.
Thrice have we labored in vain to convince a majority of our brethren to accept this view. See Burd v. New Jersey Tel. Co., 76 N.J. 284, 293 (1978) (concurring opinion); Moran v. Napolita-no, 71 N.J. 133, 142 (1976) (dissenting opinion); Fox v. Passaic General Hospital, 71 N.J. 122, 128 (1976) (dissenting opinion). Given the notable lack of success of these efforts, one might reasonably conclude that the time has come to abandon the cause — if not out of respect for stare decisis, then in keeping with the wisdom of the Talmud as reported by Justice Frankfurter:
*79The Talmud says that if, when you are stone sober, a man tells you that you are drunk, knock his teeth out; if two men tell you that, laugh at them; but if three men tell you that, go to bed.1
But we persist in the endeavor, not because we think we can improve on the expression of our position as set forth in the three opinions referred to above, but because the facts of this case so strongly reinforce that position.
The statute of limitations would ordinarily begin to run at the time of defendant’s alleged tortious conduct — here, January 23, 19742 — and would expire two years later, in January 1976. Although plaintiff did not consult her present counsel until April 1976, she was represented by a different lawyer in connection, with a related personal injury suit during the entire two-year period from January 1974 to January 1976. That suit involved plaintiff’s claim against the landlord of the premises upon which she fell in December 1972 and sustained the injuries for which Dr. Rubacky furnished treatment. Her attorney in that case, a seasoned and able practitioner in personal injury litigation, started suit against the landlord in January 1974. He settled the case around April 1976 (the Stipulation of Dismissal was filed May 6, 1976), having indicated complete disinterest in pursing plaintiff’s malpractice claim. Immediately after that settlement, on May 17, 1976, present counsel commenced the instant action.
Although one might wonder about plaintiff’s selection of different attorneys to prosecute claims so obviously interrelated, *80that circumstance is not in itself significant. What is significant is that for the entire two years from January 1974 plaintiff was not unguided or without counsel to advise her on the necessity for expeditious filing of any claim against her physician. She had a lawyer at the very time she says she discovered her cause of action against the doctor in May 1974. The interrelationship between the claim against the landlord and the claim against the treating physician is readily apparent.3 That interrelationship doubtless created an awkward problem of effective presentation of the separate claims; but we fail to discern any equitable considerations flowing from that circumstance that should in any way inure to plaintiff’s benefit in a statute of limitations context.- The fact remains that from the time Mrs. Lynch claims she discovered her cause of action against Dr. Rubacky, there remained twenty months within which to file suit against him — the unexpired balance of the two years from the date of his alleged malpractice in January 1974.
Whether plaintiff’s failure to have started suit within that time was a matter of “strategy,” so that she would not have the two interrelated personal injury claims unresolved and in litigation simultaneously, is a matter about which one can only conjecture. No explanation is offered. In the absence of any explanation, or in the face of an explanation grounded in litigation strategy, we would think it beyond question that a policy favoring diligent pursuit of lawsuits should prevail.
Plaintiff’s suit, not having been filed within the twenty months of the unexpired statute of limitations remaining after discovery of her cause of action, should be barred.
*81Moreover, under straightforward application of Lopez v. Swyer, 62 N.J. 267 (1973), and Burd v. N.J. Tel. Co., 76 N.J. 284 (1978), the judgment below should be affirmed, even without the wrinkle or modification we have sought thus far unavailingly to inject into the law developed in those cases. The discovery rule provides that “in an appropriate case a cause of action will be held not to accrue until the injured party discovers, or by an exercise of reasonable diligence and intelligence should have discovered that he may have a basis for an actionable claim.” Lopez v. Swyer, supra, 62 N.J. at 272 (emphasis added). This statement has been characterized as the “essence of the rule.” Burd v. N.J. Tel. Co., supra, 76 N.J. at 287. In Lopez the Court affirmed the Appellate Division’s decision to remand for a hearing on “the question as to when plaintiffs knew or should reasonably have known the nature of [plaintiff’s] illness and its causal relationship with the alleged negligence.” 62 N.J. at 272. The burden of proof rested on the plaintiff. Id. at 276. The Court in Burd ruled that the discovery principle was not dependent upon plaintiff’s knowledge or lack of knowledge that a cause of action existed, but rather upon the plaintiff’s awareness of the underlying state of facts which could serve as the framework for a cause of action. Burd commented on this aspect of the discovery rule as follows:
The statute of limitations necessarily imputes conclusively to a claimant knowledge that the law affords or may afford a cause of action on the basis of those facts of injury and causal relationship which in law do evoke a cause of action. In this regard it is of no consequence whether the cause of action arises in the field of products liability or any other aspect of tort law, or as to the degree of expertise which different lawyers possess in one such field or another. The discovery principle modifies the conventional limitations rule only to the extent of postponing the commencement of accrual of the cause of action until plaintiff learns, or reasonably should learn, the existence of that state of facts which may equate in law with a cause of action. [76 N.J. at 291 (emphasis in original).]
The key elements are knowledge of injury and knowledge of its cause. This knowledge, actual or constructive, must suggest the fault of another. The test to be applied is objective: *82whether a reasonably prudent person under the circumstances should have known or discovered these factors. Both the trial court and Appellate Division in the instant case acknowledged and applied these elements of the discovery rule derived from Lopez and Burd. An examination of the record discloses abundant evidence in support of the trial court’s conclusion that “plaintiff by the exercise of reasonable diligence should have known or discovered a basis for an actionable claim against this defendant no later than February of 1974,” wherefore the complaint, having been filed more than two years thereafter, was properly dismissed.
Defendant, Dr. Rubacky, treated plaintiff for a fracture of the right ankle due to a fall on her landlord’s premises in December 1972. On January 4, 1973, he inserted three pins in her ankle as part of an operation. At visits in March, April and May plaintiff complained about severe pain and swelling. Although in May she was told not to come back until October, plaintiff returned in July complaining of indescribable pain. Dr. Rubacky x-rayed the ankle and told her there was nothing wrong with it. She then asked him to examine the x-rays more carefully, saying, “It can’t be fine. I am in too much pain. There has to be something wrong.” Upon reexamination he admitted that a pin was slipping out of place. Although he removed the pin in a second operation in July 1973, the pain and swelling in plaintiff’s ankle persisted, making it impossible for her to stand for any length of time. Thereafter, Dr. Rubacky assured plaintiff that her ankle was fine and intimated that the only ailment preventing her return to her job as a hairdresser was her lack of desire to work.
When plaintiff last saw Dr. Rubacky on January 23, 1974, he told her that her ankle was “completed healed” and she was imagining the pain. He suggested that she see a psychiatrist and return in six months. She went home after this visit and immediately made an appointment to consult Dr. Argiroff, an *83orthopedic surgeon. He examined plaintiff on February 12, 1974 and told her “there would have to be another operation or [her] ankle would never be any better.” This third operation was performed on February 21, 1974, when Dr. Argiroff removed another loose pin in the ankle. His preoperative diagnosis had been: “Old fracture dislocation of a right ankle, with disruption of the ankle mortise, and loose Steinman pin in the ankle joint.”
In the face of these widely — even wildly — divergent opinions rendered in such close proximity by Drs. Rubacky and Argiroff, reasonable diligence would require plaintiff to ask why it was she needed yet a third operation. She could have asked Dr. Argiroff. She could have sought an opinion from still another physician. She could have raised the question with the lawyer representing her in the fall-down case. It matters not that when Dr. Argiroff told plaintiff of the need for further surgical intervention “he did not at that time plant in plaintiff’s mind any seed of suspicion against Dr. Rubacky”, ante at 76. What does matter is that plaintiff’s natural suspicions should reasonably have been awakened without any further hints or additional help from Dr. Argiroff, that she should have acted upon those suspicions, and that she did not.
Facts revealed at the Lopez hearing below further support this application of the discovery rule. Plaintiff testified that in 1973 she thought that if the operation by Dr. Rubacky had been performed properly, the pain would have subsided. In her words the unremitting pain indicated to her that “there was something wrong.” She also said that as the pain persisted during 1973, she became dissatisfied with the doctor’s treatment. She felt that he treated her "very badly,” and told him that she strongly disagreed with his assertions that her ankle was healed. Plaintiff further testified that she went to Dr. Argiroff because she was not satisfied with Dr. Rubacky’s treatment and wanted some relief from her pain.
*84Hence, the testimony demonstrates plaintiff’s long-term dissatisfaction with Dr. Rubacky’s insistence that her ankle was healed despite her pain and inability to stand for long periods of time. It shows that plaintiff immediately underwent a third operation when advised to do so by Dr. Argiroff. And it discloses, perhaps most significantly, plaintiff’s belief that had Dr. Rubacky’s treatment been rendered properly, her pain would have subsided. Even if all of this be insufficient to charge plaintiff with actual knowledge of Dr. Rubacky’s dereliction, surely it is enough, when coupled with the contradictory medical advice, to demonstrate that by the exercise of the Lopez requirement of “reasonable diligence and intelligence” plaintiff should have discovered that she might have “a basis for an actionable claim.” The trial court’s conclusion in this regard was a reasonable factual determination, made, as Lopez envisions, “by a judge conscious of the equitable nature of the issues before him.” 62 N.J. at 275.
Finally, no particular significance should attach to the fact that plaintiff acted reasonably in attending to her medical needs. Ante at 77. That observation by the majority effects a deft reformulation of the Lopez test, a subtle but not inconsequential shift from Lopez’s requirement of reasonable diligence in ascertaining the basis for a claim to a markedly less demanding requirement of reasonable diligence and intelligence in attending to one’s medical needs. This so severely waters down one critical element of the Lopez test as very nearly to wash it away.
We would affirm.
POLLOCK, J., concurring in the result.
For reversal — Chief Justice WILENTZ and Justices SULLIVAN, PASHMAN, HANDLER and POLLOCK — 5.
For affirmance — Justices CLIFFORD and SCHREIBER — 2.

Letter from Felix Frankfurter to Jerome N. Frank (undated), reprinted in 61 Cornell L.Rev. 950, 977 & n. 141 (1976).

It is not entirely clear from the majority opinion what defendant’s alleged dereliction was or when it occurred. At oral argument counsel asserted that the malpractice consisted of improper post-operative care, particularly with respect to advice about weight bearing. Fixing January 23, 1974, the last occasion on which defendant rendered treatment, as the time of the alleged tortious act for purposes of triggering the statute of limitations gives plaintiff the benefit of any doubt and is consistent with the doctrine of continuous course of treatment. See Tortorello v. Reinfeld, 6 N.J. 58, 66 (1950).

For example, it could not have escaped the attention of plaintiffs lawyer that the landlord was potentially liable for all the injuries proximately resulting from the initial tort, including, of course, the consequences of the medical treatment caused by the landlord’s wrong. See Ciluffo v. Middlesex Gen. Hosp., 146 N.J.Super. 476, 482 (App.Div.1977); Knutsen v. Brown, 96 N.J.Super. 229, 235 (App.Div.1967); Annotation, “Torts — Negligent Treatment of Injury,” 100 AL.R.2d 808, 813 (1965).