LANSING — Barely noticed outside of legal circles, recent rulings have made it far more difficult to bring civil rights and employment claims against state agencies and universities, torpedoing or severely undermining, on purely technical grounds, Michiganders’ claims of racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and more.
A May 2023 opinion by the Michigan Supreme Court — Christie v. Wayne State University — essentially shortened the statute of limitations for most lawsuits against the state to one year, down from three.
Then, last July, in Hudson v. Michigan Department of Corrections, a special seven-judge panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals declared Christie retroactive, pulling the legal rug out from under the claims of hundreds of plaintiffs who thought they were following the law when they took their cases to court.
Together, the rulings “changed the most basic ground rules for litigating against the state,” said Jennifer Lord, a Bloomfield Hills employment and civil rights attorney who represented Susan Christie in her age and disability discrimination lawsuit against Wayne State and is best-known for successfully representing thousands of residents the state falsely accused of committing unemployment insurance fraud.
Christie, which unexpectedly upended decades of standard legal practice in Michigan, is now settled law. But the question of whether it should also be retroactive — as it is for now — is in front of the Michigan Supreme Court.
“The fallout from Christie — it’s massive,” said Zachary Runyan, a St. Clair Shores attorney who is appealing the recent dismissal, on technical grounds, of a state employee’s workplace sexual harassment claims.
“I can’t tell you how many cases are just hanging in the balance to see what the Supreme Court does.”
At issue is one paragraph in state law. The only valid claims against the state of Michigan, the law says, are ones where the plaintiff files either a lawsuit or a notice of intent to sue in the Michigan Court of Claims “within one year after the claim has accrued.”
Certain types of lawsuits against the state always go to the Court of Claims — an arm of the Michigan Court of Appeals where a jury trial is not an option. Lawyers have long known that property damage claims or disputes over income tax refunds, and even the constitutional claims Lord championed over the state’s false fraud allegations against UIA recipients, must be filed in the Court of Claims. For those types of cases, lawyers have strictly observed the one-year notice requirement.
But Michigan courts have also ruled that plaintiffs are entitled to jury trials in claims under the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act and a wide range of disability and employment cases. Those cases have typically been filed in county circuit courts, with a three-year statute of limitations, and with almost nobody first giving notice in the Court of Claims.
Until Christie. In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Brian Zahra, the court said notice in the Court of Claims is required, even when the suit is filed in circuit court. The ruling overturned a published Michigan Court of Appeals opinion from 2020, which had not been appealed and said the exact opposite.
“To this day, it boggles my mind,” Lord said of the decision.
But a possibly bigger shock was yet to come.
In 2024, three-judge panels of the Michigan Court of Appeals issued conflicting opinions on whether Christie applied only to cases going forward or was retroactive. So the court assembled a special seven-member panel to resolve that conflict.
The test case involved Toriano Hudson, a Michigan Department of Corrections officer who received a 10-day suspension after crashing a van in 2019 that was transporting prisoners. Hudson, who is Black, sued the department in Wayne County Circuit Court in 2022, a year before the Christie decision, alleging police never said he was at fault in the accident and the discipline he received was disproportionate to what white officers received in similar cases.
Rather than delve into the arguments about whether the Christie decision should be retroactive, the conflict panel ruled that the first relevant published Court of Appeals opinion after Christie, Flamont v. Michigan Department of Corrections, said Christie was retroactive, and therefore, subsequent panels should have been bound by that and issued the same ruling.
In Flamont, the appeals court essentially said the Christie ruling should be retroactive because it did not establish new law. Christie merely stated what the “plain and unambiguous” law had always been, even if it hadn’t been properly followed, the panel found. The panel dismissed Hudson’s claims because he hadn’t filed a notice in the Court of Claims.
Jonathan Marko, a Detroit attorney representing Hudson who recently filed a brief in advance of Michigan Supreme Court oral arguments that are not yet scheduled, said the Christie ruling clearly changed what had been the law in Michigan for decades. He believes it’s impacted thousands of plaintiffs, taking into account both existing cases and potential cases that now will never be filed.
“Retroactive application would extinguish the claims of an entire class of litigants who complied with binding precedent, not because they failed to follow the law, but because the law changed after they acted,” Marko wrote in his March 25 Michigan Supreme Court brief.
“It would bar meritorious actions without regard to their substance, expose attorneys to liability for following the law as it existed, and undermine the very predictability on which adherence to precedent depends.”
Through a spokeswoman, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel declined an interview request to discuss Christie and its retroactivity.
Nessel’s spokeswoman, Kimberly Bush, declined to comment when asked why employment claims against companies such as General Motors should have three-year statutes of limitations while similar claims against state employers would have statutes of limitation of only one year.
The state has yet to file its brief for the pending Michigan Supreme Court case and “we will be making our comments before the court when we file our brief,” Bush said in an April 9 email.
Marko said that in some cases, the state has argued that claims under the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act are personal injury cases that should be subject to only a six-month statute of limitations, not one year. He disagrees with that argument but does not expect it to be fully resolved by the case pending before the Michigan Supreme Court, he said.
Daniel Tukel, a Troy attorney with the Butzel law firm who represented Wayne State in the Christie case, did not respond to an April 8 email requesting an interview.
Marko said several of his lawsuits against the state have been negatively impacted by Christie, including a 2022 case filed in Washtenaw County Circuit Court on behalf of Kim Cargor, then a 61-year-old Black deputy warden at the MDOC who alleged her career had been stalled as a result of cronyism and racism. That case was dismissed on technical grounds over the notice requirement and retroactive application of Christie, Marko told the Detroit Free Press on April 9.
“This is a huge boon for the state in terms of, overnight, being able to clear the decks, so to speak, in a real unjust way,” Marko said in the interview.
Runyan is representing two MDOC employees who sued the department in 2025, alleging sexual harassment by Chris Gautz, the department’s former longtime public information officer.
A suit against Gautz, the MDOC, and MDOC Director Heidi Washington filed by Lisa Gass was partially dismissed by a Wayne County Circuit Court judge in November 2025, over the one-year notice requirement set out in Christie, records show. A suit filed by a second accuser, Kyla Holmes, was dismissed in its entirety in December 2025, in Ingham County Circuit Court, on similar grounds, said Runyan, who has appealed both rulings to the Michigan Court of Appeals.
The women’s claims against Gautz were automatically stayed when Gautz filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in July 2025, records show.
The state in some cases has argued that claims against current and former state employees, such as Gautz, should also be dismissed in cases where notice was not filed in the Court of Claims, though most lawyers interviewed said they believe claims against state employees can continue, even where claims against state agencies are dismissed.
In fact, Lord said an unintended consequence of the Christie ruling will likely be attorneys adding state employees as defendants in cases where the one-year notice requirement against state agencies is lacking.
In the Gass lawsuit, Wayne Circuit Judge Edward Joseph allowed her claims against the MDOC that arose after May 4, 2024 — one year before Gass gave notice in the Court of Claims — to continue, while dismissing claims against the agency that arose earlier than that. Joseph allowed all claims against Washington to continue, determining that as a state official Washington is not subject to the one-year notice requirement.
But in the Holmes case, Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dismissed all claims against all defendants, citing Christie. Runyan said he believes Aquilina has been consistent in doing that with claims against the state impacted by Christie, leaving those cases to be adjudicated by appellate courts.
Lansing attorney Patrick O’Keefe said he recently had some of his claims dismissed, in Eaton County Circuit Court, over the notice requirement, in a lawsuit he filed in 2024 on behalf of Michigan State Police Trooper Megan Moryc, who alleged the agency set her up for failure, subjected her to discrimination based on her gender, and repeatedly retaliated against her when she complained.
Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Quiet change throws Michigan cases into limbo: ‘It’s massive’
Reporting by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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