This week I’m being Carrie’s associate.  She gave me a fascinating topic to research:  Can the doctor who involuntarily sterilized her client, a woman with developmental disabilities, argue that the statute he violated is unconstitutional because it infringes the privacy rights of … women with developmental disabilities.  I believe this is covered by the con law doctrine of chutzpah.

Anyway, in researching this, I have had more WTF moments than in most projects.   For example, I came across these two stunning examples of Civ Pro Gone Evil and thought I’d share.  (Squibs are from Westlaw; don’t blame me for the retro language.)

Lake v. Arnold, 232 F.3d 360 (3d Cir. 2000): Mentally retarded woman’s Pennsylvania claims challenging allegedly nonconsensual sterilization accrued under Pennsylvania’s two-year statute of limitations for personal injury suits when she was sterilized in 1977, notwithstanding that she was 16 years old and mentally retarded when sterilization occurred, and that any suit that could have been brought at that time would have been brought by her father and step-mother, who had arranged for sterilization to be performed.

Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978): Woman, who had been sterilized by order of Indiana circuit court when she was 15 years old, and her husband brought civil rights action against her mother, her mother’s attorney, the medical practitioners who performed the sterilization and judge who ordered it. … The Supreme Court, Mr. Justice White, held that: … (2) neither the procedural errors the judge may have committed nor the lack of a specific statute authorizing his approval of the petition in question rendered him liable in damages, and (3) because the judge who performed the type of act normally performed only by judges and because he did so in his capacity as a circuit court judge, the informality with which he proceeded did not render his action “nonjudicial” for purposes of depriving him of his absolute immunity.

*****

Update:  Susan Greene’s excellent column about the case here.