Barry S. Landsberg

Come the first Monday in October, Landsberg may know whether the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case accusing his client, a hospital owned by the Dignity Health group, of sex discrimination for refusing to allow a transgender man to receive an elective hysterectomy there.

Landsberg, a highly respected litigator and appellate advocate in health care, said his client did not deny the surgery because the man is transgender. “That quite literally is not the case,” he said.

Although a majority of Dignity’s hospitals are affiliated with the Catholic Church, many are not. In this case, the hospital quickly referred the patient to a non-Catholic Dignity hospital nearby, where the surgery was performed within days.

“The only reason this hospital couldn’t do this one thing is because of its ethical and religious objectives, not because it has some animus toward transgender people, because [they will] treat you for anything else.”

Landsberg’s cert petition reached the Supreme Court last term, but the court did not act on it. Minton v. Dignity Health, 19-1135

Landsberg said his group, which also represents the Providence St. Joseph Health system, has been flooded with cases challenging Catholic hospitals’ religious positions in the last few years. “The cases to me are just a complete assault on religious freedom,” he said.

One involves the refusal by a Dignity hospital in Redding to perform an elective postpartum tubal ligation. “She just wanted to be done with having children and the hospital said no,” Landsberg said. “Catholic hospitals never do anything with a contraceptive purpose.” The parties are waiting for the court to rule after a two-day hearing in May. Chamorro v. Dignity Health, CGC-15-549626 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Dec. 28, 2015).

Although the religious cases are his most high-profile, the majority of his caseload involves issues such as doctors upset over peer review decisions against them.

He scored an important victory in that field in August, when the state Supreme Court unanimously rejected a physician’s contention that a peer review hearing officer would be financially biased because the officer had worked for the hospital before and might again. The court specifically disapproved of a contrary appellate decision from 2004. Natarajan v. Dignity Health, 2021 DJDAR 8243 (Cal., Aug. 12, 2021).

“That’s a big decision in this particular world,” Landsberg said.

— Don DeBenedictis