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Laney v. Fairview City8/9/2002
ndicate the reasonableness of the act. The statute does not cut an unnecessarily wide swath through causes of action against medical providers. Rather, immunity is provided under limited circumstances and only for the purpose of encouraging potentially life-saving emergency medical care. Therefore, we think the act is a reasonable attempt to eliminate a clear social evil and does not violate article I, section 11 of the Utah Constitution. Id.
In Cruz v. Wright, 765 P.2d 869 (Utah 1988), we similarly considered whether the Married Women's Act of 1898 violated article I, section 11. We assumed that prior to the passage of the Married Women's Act, the common law rule applied allowing a husband a cause of action for loss of consortium against a third party who negligently injured his wife. The Married Women's Act, as interpreted by this court, eliminated the husband's remedy. We stressed that under the Berry test, the legislature may eliminate or abrogate a cause of action entirely if there is sufficient reason and the elimination or abrogation is not an arbitrary or unreasonable means of achieving the objective. We wrote:
Therefore, even if a loss-of-consortium cause of action did exist at common law in Utah (and there is no evidence that such an action did exist), that would not prevent the legislature from modifying or abolishing that cause of action if necessary to serve sufficiently strong legislative ends. Having considered the question, we conclude that the passage of the Married Women's Act was a reasonable legislative enactment intended and reasonably tailored to place men and women on equal footing with respect to their ability to bring actions for their own injuries and to extinguish the concept that a wife was the property of her husband. If, in the process, the husband's right to sue for loss of his wife's consortium, which may have never existed in Utah, was abolished, we conclude that the abolition was not an unreasonable step. Cruz, 765 P.2d at 871 (citations and footnote omitted).
Cases involving statutes of limitation and statutes of repose have come before this court with mixed results. In an early case, we held that article I, section 11, did not preclude the legislature from prescribing a one-year statute of limitations for the time within which to assail the regularity or organization of an irrigation district. Horn v. Shaffer, 47 Utah 55, 151 P. 555 (1915). In three cases, statutes of repose were struck down because they barred actions without regard to the occurrence of an injury and did not provide a reasonable amount of time to file a lawsuit. No effective and reasonable alternative was provided, and the abrogation of the remedy was held to be arbitrary and unreasonable. Horton v. Goldminer's Daughter, 785 P.2d 1087 (Utah 1989); Sun Valley Water Beds of Utah, Inc. v. Herm Hughes & Son, 782 P.2d 188 (Utah 1989); Berry v. Beech Aircraft Corp., 717 P.2d 670 (Utah 1986).
The Legislature responded to the constitutional requirements outlined in the foregoing cases by enacting a new statute of repose, considered by this court in Craftsman Builders Supply v. Butler Manufacturing, 1999 UT 18, 974 P.2d 1194. In that case, we upheld a statute of repose barring actions against builders after twelve years against an article I, section 11 attack. We held that given the clear social and economic evils identified by the legislature in enacting the statute of repose together with the remote chance of injury or damage after a period of twelve years, the statute was not an arbitrary or unreasonable means of eliminating the stated evils and was constitutional. In summary, in all of the foregoing cases in which the legislation or legal rule under examination pa
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