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.
