The Child Victims Act Survives: Maryland's Highest Court Upholds Survivors' Right to Sue
For thousands of Marylanders who survived childhood sexual abuse, the last two years have carried a question almost too heavy to ask: would the courthouse door stay open? The Child Victims Act of 2023 promised that it would — abolishing the civil statute of limitations and reviving claims the old law had extinguished. But institutions facing those claims immediately argued the revival was unconstitutional, and every survivor's case filed under the Act has been waiting, in one way or another, on that answer.
Three weeks ago, the answer came. On February 3, 2025, the Supreme Court of Maryland ruled, 4–3, that the Child Victims Act's revival of previously time-barred claims is constitutional. In Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington v. John Doe — consolidated with companion cases involving a private school and a county school board — the Court rejected the institutions' central argument and cleared the way for survivors' cases to proceed.
The legal question, in plain English
Before 2023, Maryland law gave survivors of child sexual abuse until age 38 to file a civil suit. The 2023 Child Victims Act eliminated that deadline entirely — and, critically, revived claims that had already expired under the old rule.
The institutional defendants argued that the 2017 law creating the age-38 cutoff was not an ordinary statute of limitations but a statute of repose — a category of deadline that, once passed, is said to create a "vested right" to be free from suit, which the legislature cannot constitutionally take away.
The Supreme Court of Maryland held otherwise. The 2017 provision was, in substance, a statute of limitations — a procedural deadline, not a grant of permanent immunity. No one holds a vested constitutional right to a limitations defense. And under the heightened rational-basis review the Court applied, the Child Victims Act bears a "real and substantial relation" to a genuine problem the General Assembly set out to remedy: the reality, documented over decades, that survivors of childhood sexual abuse often cannot come forward until well into adulthood — long after ordinary deadlines have run.
Why the delayed-disclosure evidence mattered
The science on this point is no longer seriously contested: children who are abused by adults they trusted — clergy, teachers, coaches, counselors — commonly need decades to process, name, and disclose what happened to them. Many first tell another person in their 50s or later. A legal system that shuts its doors at 38 was not a neutral timekeeping rule; it functioned as near-total immunity for the institutions that allowed the abuse. The General Assembly said so when it passed the Act in the days after the Attorney General's report on abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and the Court's majority took that legislative judgment seriously.
What the ruling unlocks
The practical consequences are immediate. Cases that had been filed under the Act and then paused — or litigated under a cloud — while the constitutional question was pending can now move forward on their merits. The ruling also matters enormously in the Archdiocese of Baltimore bankruptcy: the Archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2023, two days before the Act took effect, and the survivors' claims pooled in that proceeding depended on the Act's validity. February 3 confirmed that those claims rest on solid constitutional ground. And for the institutions still weighing their strategy — dioceses, school systems, youth organizations — the decision removes the last realistic hope that the entire wave of accountability could be turned back at the threshold. The conversation now is about responsibility and resolution, not about whether survivors belong in court at all.
What this means for survivors in Maryland
- Your claim is legally viable, whenever the abuse occurred. There is no longer any age deadline for filing a civil child sexual abuse claim in Maryland, and the revival of older claims has now been upheld by the state's highest court.
- Institutions, not just individuals, can be held accountable. The Act reaches the schools, churches, youth organizations, and government agencies whose negligence made the abuse possible — the defendants who, unlike most individual abusers, can actually respond in damages.
- The decision was 4–3 — but it is controlling. A one-vote margin does not weaken its force. The constitutionality of the revival is settled law in Maryland's courts.
- Coming forward remains your choice, on your timeline. Nothing about this ruling rushes anyone. The entire premise of the Child Victims Act is that survivors get to decide when — and whether — to pursue accountability. (For what the process of bringing a claim actually looks like, including options for filing under a pseudonym, see our earlier coverage in this archive.)
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Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.
Update: Two months after this ruling, the General Assembly cut the Child Victims Act's damages caps for cases filed on or after June 1, 2025. For what the rollback means for pending and future cases, see our August 2025 coverage.