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The Impact of Changes in Judicial Doctrine: The Abrogation of Charitable Immunity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Bradley C. Canon  and
Dean Jaros
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Abstract

Common law doctrines may have as significant an impact on everyday life as those of the U.S. Supreme Court. This paper focuses on the abrogation of the doctrine of charitable immunity, which has occurred in 32 states since World War II. We investigate the impact of this change on average hospital room rate charges in each state. Both static and dynamic analyses are conducted. In both we control for economic and inflationary variables by using state per capita income data. Static analysis involves year-by-year comparison of room rate charges in abrogating states with those in states which retain the doctrine. The results are inconclusive. In dynamic analysis we identify those states which abrogated the doctrine and note changes in their average room rates at periods two, four, and six years subsequent to the abrogations. We also identify states which underwent no change in doctrine over the same periods. The amounts of room rate change in the two categories of states are then compared. We had expected the amount to be greater in abrogating states, and in fact this is almost universally the case. This strongly suggests that abrogation of charitable immunity has produced a demonstrable increase in hospital room rate charges.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , Summer 1979 , pp. 969 - 986
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

*

This is a revised version of a paper presented to the 1978 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York City. The authors wish to thank the American Hospital Association for assistance in data collection.

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