Jacob I. Severson v. Shabnum Gupta, et al.

Whether a state’s application of an expert-affidavit requirement to dismiss a claim of extreme and obvious medical battery—where a doctor non-consensually destroyed healthy genital tissue with a cryogen—violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause by creating an arbitrary and insurmountable barrier to justice for indigent litigants.

Whether a state court’s ruling that deliberate, catastrophic damage to a patient’s genitals constitutes merely “treatment of the correct organ, the skin” violates the Equal Protection Clause by trivializing male sexual trauma and bodily integrity in a way that would be legally unthinkable for female patients.

Does the Fourteenth Amendment permit a state court to effectively grant hospitals and physicians immunity from battery claims by deeming any outcome, no matter how grievous or non-consensual, as per se compliant with an indefensible “standard of care”

Whether a state, through its judicial and medical actors, violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection by systematically exploiting a patient’s sexual humiliation—compelling the exhibition of intimate trauma as a precondition for justice, only to then dismiss that evidence as trivial— thereby inflicting a second, institutionalized injury and denying any meaningful remedy for severe bodily and dignitary harm.

Whether a state violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial (as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment) by invoking a procedural rule to dismiss a claim of severe frostbite injury—a condition universally recognized as an obvious harm by laypersons—solely because the instrument of injury was wielded by a physician, thereby creating an unconstitutional physician-specific exception to the state’s own “obvious occurrence” rule.