The Roman Catholic Bishop of Oakland, et al. v. Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County, et al.

Twenty years ago, California revived decades-old sexual-abuse claims, offering claimants a one-year window to sue even though the statute of limitations had expired long before. When that window closed at the end of 2003, the Catholic Church in California reached a series of settlements that paid out over a billion dollars without regard to the validity of any individual claim. The State tried to revive the same category of lapsed claims three more times between 2004 and 2018, but Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bills each time. In 2019, however, the Legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation reviving the claims for a second time, expressly seeking to impose “additional punishment” on the Catholic Church and other institutions for their past acts. This time, defendants’ past conduct is subject not only to claims for compensatory and punitive damages that were previously time-barred twice over, but also to additional penalties (in the form of “treble” damages) based on a newly defined category of “cover up” activity. The questions presented are:

1. Whether the Ex Post Facto Clause allows retroactive legislation that was enacted with an avowedly punitive purpose, imposes additional punitive liability for past conduct, and revives previously time-barred claims for punitive damages.

2. Whether the Due Process Clause allows a state to revive time-barred claims for a second time, after inducing widespread detrimental reliance on the statutory cut-off date that extinguished liability at the end of the first revival window.