Crucially:

• MIRC did not seek damages for past denials of benefits.
• It asked the court only to prohibit enforcement of the challenged policy going forward.

D. The COCA Notice Provision at Issue

MCL 600.6431(1) provides:

Except as otherwise provided in this section, a claim may not be maintained against this state unless the claimant, within 1 year after the claim has accrued, files in the office of the clerk of the court of claims either a written claim or a written notice of intention to file a claim against this state or any of its departments, commissions, boards, institutions, arms, or agencies.

MCL 600.6431(2) further requires that the notice specify:

• “the time when and the place where the claim arose,”
• “a detailed statement of the nature of the claim and of the items of damage alleged or claimed to have been sustained,” and
• a verified signature.

The central dispute is whether these requirements make sense—or can even logically be satisfied—when the plaintiff:

• is suing for future harm that has not yet occurred, and
• seeks only declaratory and injunctive relief (no damages).

IV. Detailed Analysis

A. Justice Welch’s Dissent: Notice Provisions Do Not Apply to Purely Prospective Relief

1. Core Principle

Justice Welch argues that Michigan law already recognizes a fundamental distinction between:

• Retroactive relief (e.g., damages, refunds of money already paid), and
• Prospective relief (e.g., injunctions or declarations to prevent future unlawful conduct).

Her central legal claim: Notice and limitations provisions govern claims for retroactive relief but do not bar suits seeking to prevent future harms.

2. Reliance on Taxpayers Allied for Constitutional Taxation v Wayne Co

Justice Welch’s primary precedent is Taxpayers Allied for Constitutional Taxation v Wayne Co, 450 Mich 119 (1995).

In Taxpayers Allied:

• Wayne County had adopted a tax increase in 1981.
• In 1991, taxpayers sued, seeking:
  1. a declaration that the tax increase was invalid,
  2. an injunction against future assessment and collection of the increased tax, and
  3. a refund of taxes already paid.
• Lower courts dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds.

The Michigan Supreme Court reversed in part, drawing a sharp temporal distinction:

• For refunds (retroactive money relief), the claims accrued when taxes became due; the statute of limitations barred refunds for taxes due more than one year before suit.
• For prospective injunctive relief, the statute of limitations could not bar a taxpayer from seeking to enjoin the future imposition of unconstitutional taxes:

  “[A] suit for injunctive relief may seek to prevent a future wrong, [so] the cause of action necessarily arises before the wrong occurs.” 450 Mich at 127.

But Michigan’s accrual statute, MCL 600.5827, provides that “the claim accrues at the time the wrong upon which the claim is based was done regardless of the time when the damage results.” The Court reconciled these rules by holding that:

• Limitations periods apply to claims for retroactive monetary relief.
• They do not bar otherwise valid claims for prospective injunctive relief directed at future wrongs.
• Declaratory relief follows the same pattern: if it is essentially retroactive (e.g., a declaration that money must be refunded), it is subject to limitations; if it is derivative of a non-time-barred prospective injunctive claim, it is not barred. See 450 Mich at 128–129.

Justice Welch imports this structure directly into the COCA context. She treats the COCA notice provision as a functional analog to a statute of limitations, citing Christie and Fairley, which view notice as a condition precedent to the state’s waiver of sovereign immunity.

3. Application to MIRC’s Suit

Applying Taxpayers Allied, Justice Welch reasons:

• If MIRC had sought money damages or compensation for past economic harms (e.g., costs incurred in 2017–2019 because of the policy), those claims would have accrued when the past wrongs occurred and would be subject to the one-year notice requirement; failure to comply would bar retroactive relief.
• But MIRC seeks only prospective declaratory relief—to stop continued enforcement of an allegedly unconstitutional policy. For that category of relief, under Taxpayers Allied, the notice/limitations framework should not apply.

She thus would hold that:

“The COCA’s notice provision does not prevent MIRC from seeking declaratory relief for harm that has not yet happened.” (Welch, J., dissenting, p 4)

4. Textual Argument: Logical Impossibility of Noticing Future Harm

Justice Welch also reads the text of MCL 600.6431(2) as implicitly oriented toward past harm:

• The notice must contain a “statement of the time when and the place where the claim arose” and “items of damage alleged or claimed to have been sustained.”
• Those requirements presuppose that a discrete wrong has already occurred and that concrete damages have already been sustained.

In her view, it is impossible to satisfy these terms for a claim aimed at a future wrong:

• There is no specific “time” when the claim “arose” if the wrong has not yet occurred.
• There are no “items of damage” yet sustained.

This textual point dovetails with Taxpayers Allied: both emphasize that standard limitations and accrual concepts do not fit neatly with claims designed to prevent future violations.

5. Purpose-Based Argument: Notice’s Rationales Don’t Fit Prospective Relief

Justice Welch invokes the purpose of the COCA notice requirement, as explained in Christie v Wayne State Univ, 511 Mich 39 (2023), and Fairley v Dep’t of Corrections, 497 Mich 290 (2015):

• To ensure the proper state entity learns of a potential claim;
• To allow timely investigation and discovery;
• To allow the state to create fiscal reserves to cover potential liability.

She reasons that these goals are ill-suited to purely prospective constitutional claims:

• There is no danger of stale evidence when the alleged wrong is an ongoing policy and no past damages are being adjudicated.
• There is no need to set aside funds for damages if no monetary relief is sought.

Thus, applying the notice requirement to such suits neither fits the text nor advances the statute’s purposes; instead, it would “truncate the plaintiff’s legitimate claim to prospective relief”, contrary to Taxpayers Allied.

6. Welch’s Bottom Line

Justice Welch concludes:

• Statutes of limitation and notice provisions apply to declaratory or injunctive claims that are functionally retroactive.
• They do not apply to declaratory or injunctive actions that seek to prevent future harms arising from ongoing government policies.
• The Court of Appeals therefore erred in treating MIRC’s prospective declaratory action as accruing in 2019 and subject to MCL 600.6431’s one-year notice requirement.

She would have granted leave and reversed, allowing MIRC’s prospective challenge to proceed on the merits.

B. Justice Thomas’s Dissent: Sovereign Immunity, State Officers, and Ex parte Young

1. Statutory Text: Notice Applies to the State and Its Entities, Not to Officers

Justice Thomas begins with a close reading of the COCA:

• Jurisdictional provision – MCL 600.6419(1)(a) gives the Court of Claims jurisdiction:

  “[t]o hear and determine . . . any demand for monetary, equitable, or declaratory relief or any demand for an extraordinary writ against the state or any of its departments or officers . . . .” (emphasis added)

• Notice provision – MCL 600.6431(1) bars maintenance of a claim “against this state” unless a written claim or notice is filed “against this state or any of its departments, commissions, boards, institutions, arms, or agencies” within one year.

Key observation: The jurisdictional provision expressly includes suits against officers, but the notice provision does not mention “officers” at all.

Applying standard canons of statutory interpretation (context, avoidance of surplusage, reading provisions harmoniously), Justice Thomas concludes:

• The Legislature knew how to include officers when it wished to; it did so in MCL 600.6419.
• Its omission of “officers” in MCL 600.6431(1), while still listing the state, departments, commissions, boards, etc., indicates an intent that the notice requirement not apply to suits against individual state officers.

He finds support in Pike v Northern Mich Univ, 327 Mich App 683 (2019), where the Court of Appeals distinguished suits against state employees from those against the state itself and noted the absence of any reference to officers in MCL 600.6431.

Thus, purely as a matter of statutory construction, Justice Thomas would hold that:

MCL 600.6431 does not govern constitutional claims seeking prospective relief against state officers in their official capacities.

2. Constitutional Avoidance and Legislative Awareness

Justice Thomas notes:

• Michigan courts assume the Legislature legislates against the background of existing common law and constitutional doctrines.
• By the time of the relevant COCA enactments, the Ex parte Young doctrine, allowing suits against state officers for ongoing constitutional violations, was well established and recognized.
• Michigan itself had acknowledged such suits in cases like Thompson v Auditor General, 261 Mich 624 (1933).

Against that background, he reads the statutory omission of “officers” from the notice provision as a conscious decision to avoid conflict with the longstanding rule that officials lack immunity from prospective constitutional claims.

He also invokes the doctrine of constitutional avoidance: where a case can be resolved on statutory grounds without reaching constitutional questions (e.g., about the Legislature’s power to insulate officers from constitutional accountability), courts should prefer that route.

3. Federal Law: Ex parte Young and Federal Due Process Claims in State Court

Justice Thomas then examines the federal law of sovereign immunity in the context of:

• federal constitutional claims,
• against state officials,
• seeking prospective relief.

Under Ex parte Young, 209 US 123 (1908), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state official enforcing an unconstitutional law:

“comes into conflict with the superior authority of [the Federal] Constitution, and he is in that case stripped of his official or representative character and is subjected in his person to the consequences of his individual conduct.” 209 US at 159–160.

This fiction allows courts to grant prospective relief against state officials in their official capacity, despite state sovereign immunity, so long as:

• the plaintiff alleges an ongoing violation of federal law, and
• the relief sought is prospective (injunctive or declaratory), not retroactive monetary damages. See, e.g., Va Office for Protection & Advocacy v Stewart, 563 US 247, 255 (2011); Edelman v Jordan, 415 US 651 (1974).

Justice Thomas emphasizes:

• This doctrine applies in state courts as well as federal courts. See Alden v Maine, 527 US 706, 747 (1999); Gen Oil Co v Crain, 209 US 211 (1908).
• Michigan recognized this over 90 years ago in Thompson v Auditor General, which endorsed allowing mandamus or injunction against state officers for federal constitutional violations in state courts.

MIRC’s federal due process claims, as described by Justice Thomas, fall squarely within Ex parte Young:

• MIRC alleges an ongoing violation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the continued enforcement of a policy denying workers’ compensation to undocumented workers.
• It seeks only prospective declaratory and injunctive relief, no damages.

From this, Justice Thomas draws a key conclusion:

Because Ex parte Young recognizes that officials lack sovereign immunity to federal constitutional suits for prospective relief, such suits do not depend on the state’s waiver of immunity and thus cannot be conditioned on compliance with state-law notice provisions that derive from that waiver.

In other words, for federal due process claims:

• MIRC does not need the benefit of the state’s waiver of immunity.
• The COCA notice provision—an expression of conditions on that waiver—simply does not apply.

4. State Constitutional Claims: Extending the Ex parte Young-Type Principle

Justice Thomas then turns to state law: should a similar principle apply when plaintiffs allege ongoing violations of the Michigan Constitution by state officers?

He begins from Michigan’s own constitutional structure:

• The Michigan Constitution of 1963 is a limitation on government power, not a grant.
• The people are the sovereign; the branches of government, including the Legislature, are creatures of the Constitution.
• The courts have a special role in vindicating constitutional rights, as recognized in decisions like:
  • Bauserman v Unemployment Ins Agency, 509 Mich 673 (2022),
  • Mays v Governor, 506 Mich 157 (2020), and
  • Sharp v Lansing, 464 Mich 792 (2001).

In Smith v Dep’t of Pub Health, 428 Mich 540 (1987), a fractured Court nonetheless agreed that sovereign immunity is “not available” in state court to bar constitutional tort claims alleging that the state, by custom or policy, violated rights conferred by the Michigan Constitution. That case concerned damages, not prospective relief, and lacked a single majority rationale, but it stands for the idea that:

The Legislature cannot use immunity doctrines to leave state constitutional rights effectively without a remedy.

Justice Thomas reads these cases, together with Bauserman, as reinforcing a core principle: rights require remedies. The Legislature cannot, by statute, license constitutional violations or wholly remove judicial remedies for ongoing constitutional harms:

• “[T]he Legislature cannot grant a license to state and local government actors to violate the Michigan Constitution.” – Sharp v Lansing, 464 Mich at 810.
• “Those choices are contained within the Constitution.” – Bauserman, 509 Mich at 704.

From this, he suggests that Michigan should adopt, at least by analogy, the core insight of Ex parte Young for state constitutional claims:

• When a state officer enforces a policy that violates the Michigan Constitution, that official acts beyond constitutional authority.
• Such conduct cannot be shielded by state sovereign immunity, because immunity is itself subordinate to the Constitution.
• Therefore, state officers cannot assert sovereign immunity against suits for prospective relief that seek to halt ongoing violations of the Michigan Constitution.

He also observes that COCA’s structure—jurisdiction over suits against “officers” but no notice requirement applied to them—aligns with this understanding.

5. Thomas’s Bottom Line

Justice Thomas’s conclusions can be summarized as:

1. Statutory holding (preferred): By its own terms, MCL 600.6431 applies only to suits against “the state” and its departments, commissions, boards, institutions, arms, or agencies, not to suits against “officers.” Therefore, the notice provision does not bar MIRC’s suit against the Governor in her official capacity.
2. Federal constitutional overlay: Even if the Legislature had intended MCL 600.6431 to apply to such suits, it could not bar MIRC’s federal due process claim, because under Ex parte Young the Governor lacks immunity to suits seeking prospective relief for ongoing violations of federal law.
3. State constitutional structure: A similar principle should apply to state due process claims; the Legislature cannot immunize officers from suits that seek prospective relief against ongoing violations of the Michigan Constitution.

He thus would have granted leave, clarified the law of sovereign immunity and COCA’s reach, and allowed MIRC’s prospective constitutional claims to be heard on the merits.

C. Precedents and Doctrinal Threads

The dissents collectively invoke several doctrinal strands worth unpacking.

1. Christie v Wayne State Univ and the Scope of COCA Notice

In Christie, 511 Mich 39 (2023), the Court:

• Reaffirmed that the COCA is “this state's controlling legislative expression of waiver of the state's sovereign immunity,” quoting Greenfield Constr Co v Dep't of State Hwys, 402 Mich 172 (1978).
• Held that compliance with MCL 600.6431 is mandatory for claims within the Court of Claims’ jurisdiction.
• Interpreted the notice requirement broadly and strictly as a condition precedent to suit.

The Court of Appeals, in MIRC’s case, relied on Christie to support a sweeping view: the notice requirement applies to “all claims” against the state unless a specific statutory exemption appears.

Justice Welch does not dispute Christie’s general characterization of MCL 600.6431 but argues that Taxpayers Allied shows how limitations/notice regimes function differently when the relief sought is entirely prospective. Justice Thomas, by contrast, narrows the scope of “claims” subject to MCL 600.6431 by focusing on the entities it names (state, departments, etc.) and the omission of “officers.” Both approaches seek to harmonize Christie with long-standing doctrines ensuring judicial review of ongoing unlawful governmental action.

2. Taxpayers Allied, AFSCME, and Accrual

The Court of Appeals’ reliance on general accrual principles from AFSCME v Highland Park Bd of Ed (claim accrues when suit may be brought) clashes, in the dissents’ view, with the nuanced approach in Taxpayers Allied:

• AFSCME sets a default rule; Taxpayers Allied recognizes that where the relief is to prevent a future wrong, “the cause of action necessarily arises before the wrong occurs,” and the statute of limitations “does not prevent” such a taxpayer from seeking an injunction.
• Justice Welch extends this logic to the COCA notice provision, treating it as analogous to a limitations bar for purposes of temporal reach.

3. Ex parte Young, Alden v Maine, and Federal Law in State Courts

Ex parte Young and its progeny establish that:

• State sovereign immunity (including Eleventh Amendment immunity in federal court) does not bar suits against state officials for ongoing violations of federal law seeking prospective relief.
• This principle governs in both federal and state courts. Alden v Maine clarified that states retain sovereign immunity in their own courts, but that does not undermine the viability of Ex parte Young-type suits against officials.

Justice Thomas stresses that Michigan courts must apply United States Supreme Court precedent on federal questions, citing Abela v Gen Motors Corp, 469 Mich 603 (2004). Thus, Michigan courts must permit Ex parte Young-style actions. A state-law notice provision tied to waiver of sovereign immunity cannot undercut that federal command.

4. Smith, Bauserman, Mays, and State Constitutional Remedies

Smith v Dep’t of Pub Health recognized that plaintiffs can bring direct state constitutional claims (so-called “constitutional torts”) for damages against the state where no adequate alternative remedy exists. While fractured, it commonly rejected broad sovereign immunity from such claims. Later:

• Mays v Governor (Flint water crisis) reaffirmed the judiciary’s central role in enforcing constitutional limitations on government.
• Bauserman v Unemployment Ins Agency emphasized that rights in the Michigan Constitution require judicially enforceable remedies unless the Constitution itself says otherwise.

Justice Thomas reads these cases as supporting a robust remedial principle: the Legislature may regulate remedies, but it may not functionally nullify state constitutional rights by insulating ongoing violations from judicial scrutiny through procedural conditions tied to sovereign immunity.

D. Impact and Future Ramifications

1. No Immediate Precedent, But Strong Signals

Because:

• The Supreme Court denied leave without opinion; and
• The Court of Appeals’ decision is unpublished and thus nonbinding;

there is no binding new rule on:

• whether MCL 600.6431 applies to suits seeking purely prospective relief, or
• whether it applies to suits against officers in their official capacities.

However, the detailed dissents:

• Offer a roadmap for future litigants and lower courts.
• Set out two analytically distinct, but converging, paths to allowing prospective constitutional challenges to proceed:
  1. The temporal distinction between prospective and retroactive relief (Taxpayers Allied/Welch).
  2. The entity-based and sovereign-immunity-based distinction between claims against the state itself and claims against officers (Ex parte Young/Thomas).

2. Practical Litigation Strategy

For plaintiffs challenging ongoing state policies as unconstitutional, these dissents suggest several strategic considerations:

• Pleaded defendant: Suing the relevant state officer in an official capacity rather than the “state” or a “department” may better align with Justice Thomas’s statutory reading (that “officers” are not subject to MCL 600.6431).
• Type of relief: Framing the suit as seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, without damages or retroactive relief, strengthens the argument under Justice Welch’s Taxpayers Allied-based approach.
• Federal vs state claims: Including federal constitutional claims, especially under the Fourteenth Amendment, invokes Ex parte Young directly and may foreclose reliance on state-law notice provisions as bars to suit.