Recovery Innovations, Inc., et al. v. Kenneth Rawson

In Lebron v. Nat'l R.R. Passenger Corp., 513 U.S. 374, 378 (1995), this Court noted inconsistency in decisions determining whether a private party is a state actor for the purpose of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Writing in dissent, Justice O’Connor expressed concern that this discontinuity in the law will allow the lower courts to continue to adopt differing approaches to this question of federal law, making it impossible to predict who will or will not be deemed a state actor in any particular case. Lebron, 513 U.S. at 408-09. In the decision below, the Ninth Circuit selected factors from different tests to hold that private medical professionals are state actors when providing mental health services pursuant to a state’s involuntary commitment law, despite numerous decisions from other Circuit Courts of Appeals having previously applied different versions of the state action test to reach the opposite conclusion. The question presented is: Whether through the provision of mental health services, a private, non-profit hospital and private healthcare providers become state actors, subject to claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, when they provide mental health services to a person who was deemed to be “gravely disabled” and to “present[ ] a likelihood of serious harm to others” under the state’s involuntary commitment law.