## Facts

- Richard and Margaret Schultz, New Jersey domiciliaries, sued individually and on behalf of their sons, including the estate of Christopher Schultz (deceased).
- Their sons attended a New Jersey Catholic school where a teacher, Brother Edmund Coakeley, also served as scoutmaster of a local Boy Scout troop.
- In July 1978, Coakeley took Christopher to a Boy Scout camp in upstate New York, where Coakeley allegedly sexually abused him; abuse allegedly continued in New Jersey.
- Plaintiffs alleged both sons were abused and that Christopher later died by suicide caused by the abuse.
- Plaintiffs sued Boy Scouts of America, Inc. (a New Jersey charitable corporation) and the Franciscan Brothers (an Ohio charitable corporation supplying teachers) for negligent hiring and supervision of Coakeley.
- New Jersey law provided charitable immunity barring certain negligence claims against charitable organizations; New York did not recognize comparable immunity.
- In earlier New Jersey litigation arising from the same abuse allegations, New Jersey’s highest court held charitable immunity barred the claims against the Archdiocese of Newark.
- New York trial court applied New Jersey law, dismissed on charitable immunity, and granted summary judgment; the Appellate Division affirmed.

## Issues

1. Under New York choice-of-law rules for torts, whether New Jersey’s charitable immunity or New York’s non-immunity rule governed claims against BSA and the Franciscan Brothers when the alleged abuse occurred partly in New York and partly in New Jersey.
2. Whether New York should refuse to apply New Jersey charitable immunity as contrary to New York public policy in a case involving child sexual abuse occurring in New York.
3. Whether the prior New Jersey judgment on charitable immunity precluded plaintiffs from relitigating that issue against these defendants in New York.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of the complaint.
- Applying interest analysis and the Neumeier rules, the court treated charitable immunity as a loss-allocating rule and applied New Jersey law to the claims against both BSA and the Franciscan Brothers.
- The court rejected a public-policy exception, concluding New Jersey’s immunity was not so offensive to New York policy as to justify nonapplication.
- The court held plaintiffs were collaterally estopped from contesting the effect of New Jersey charitable immunity because the issue had been fully litigated and decided against them in the earlier New Jersey action.

## Legal Principles

- New York choice-of-law in tort applies interest analysis, with different treatment for conduct-regulating rules (governing primary behavior) and loss-allocating rules (limiting or distributing liability after a tort).
- Charitable immunity is a loss-allocating rule for conflicts analysis.
- In loss-allocation conflicts where plaintiff and defendant share a common domicile, the common-domicile law generally governs even if injury occurred in New York.
- When parties are domiciled in different states and the tort occurs in a third jurisdiction, the place-of-tort law normally applies under Neumeier’s third rule unless another jurisdiction’s law better serves the relevant substantive purposes without materially impairing multistate certainty and uniformity.
- A forum applies a public-policy exception to foreign law only in rare cases where the foreign rule is truly repugnant; disagreement with the foreign rule’s allocation of losses is insufficient.
- Collateral estoppel applies when the identical legal issue was necessarily decided in prior litigation after a full and fair opportunity to litigate, barring relitigation in a later action.

## Conclusion

New York applied New Jersey’s charitable immunity as the controlling loss-allocation rule under interest analysis and the Neumeier framework, declined to displace that result on public-policy grounds, and held the plaintiffs bound by the prior New Jersey determination that charitable immunity barred their negligence-based claims.


Schultz v. Boy Scouts of Am., Inc., 65 N.Y.2d 189 (1985)