Court Opinion

ID: 9468788
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:23:46.920563+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:03.193997
License: Public Domain

SLOVITER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The eloquent and sympathetic dissenting opinion of our colleague, Judge Higginbotham, impels me to write separately. I believe that one could make a strong argument that termination of lawsuits on issues which are not related to the merits, such as the statute of limitations, is inherently, unjust, and that delay in instituting suit should be considered by the factfinder in making the ultimate decision but that deprivation of a plaintiff’s right to recovery on any issue other than the merits is too arbitrary a result to be countenanced under a system of law which seeks to achieve substantial justice. If application of the statute of limitations is often seen as harsh, in this case it is particularly tragic because, as Judge Higginbotham correctly notes, it compounds a great personal tragedy which has befallen the plaintiff.
Our legal system, however, is not premised on the personal view of justice by individual judges, notwithstanding the frequency with which such a charge is leveled by our critics. The statute of limitations is, as the name suggests, a creature of the legislature, not the judiciary, and it is the legislature, as the democratically elected voice of the people, which is uniquely equipped to grapple with the conflicting policies and considerations. See discussion in Roberts v. Magnetic Metals Co., 611 F.2d 450, 458 (3d Cir. 1979) (Sloviter, J., concurring). Thus the moderating quality of the discovery rule has been read into Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations not by judicial compassion but by judicial interpretation of legislative intent. See Ayers v. Morgan, 379 Pa. 282 154 A.2d 788 (1959).
In this case, in 1976 plaintiff, when a college student and past her minority under Pennsylvania law, acquired both knowledge of her condition and the possible link between her condition and DES. Several months later her inquiry to her mother as to the possible causative relationship between her condition and the operative conduct, ingestion of DES, elicited a negative response, and she made no further inquiry until 1979. The same inquiry in 1979 elicited the exact same negative response. This time, however, plaintiff pressed further and insisted that her mother call the obstetrician, who confirmed the prescription of DES.
At oral argument, this court inquired in great detail as to whether plaintiff had acquired additional knowledge by 1979 which had been unknown to her in 1976. Although plaintiff testified at her deposition that she had read additional articles, those articles were not identified and are not in the record, so that the factfinder would have no basis to. assume that they were qualitatively different in any way from the Newsweek article plaintiff read in 1976. The following colloquy occurred at oral argument:
THE COURT: What did she [plaintiff] know, in nineteen — what did she or could she have known in ’79 that she didn’t know or couldn’t have known in 1976? [Plaintiff’s Counsel]: Nothing, your Hon- or. Everything was knowable at that time.
Transcript of oral argument, p. 8. Since plaintiff admittedly had available to her substantially the same information in 1976 that she had in 1979 when she initiated the inquiry that led to knowledge of the causative relationship between her condition and her mother’s ingestion of DES, I concur in the analysis set forth in Judge Aldisert’s *713opinion, and in the unhappy result to which it leads.