Ashworth v. Branford

************************************************ The “officially released” date that appears near the beginning of an opinion is the date the opinion will be published in the Connecticut Law Journal or the date it is released as a slip opinion. The operative date for the beginning of all time periods for the filing of postopinion motions and petitions for certification is the “officially released” date appearing in the opinion. All opinions are subject to modification and technical correction prior to official publication in the Connecti- cut Law Journal and subsequently in the Connecticut Reports or Connecticut Appellate Reports. In the event of discrepancies between the advance release version of an opinion and the version appearing in the Connecticut Law Journal and subsequently in the Connecticut Reports or Connecticut Appellate Reports, the latest version is to be considered authoritative. The syllabus and procedural history accompanying an opinion that appear in the Connecticut Law Journal and subsequently in the Connecticut Reports or Connecticut Appellate Reports are copyrighted by the Secretary of the State, State of Connecticut, and may not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission of the Commission on Official Legal Publications, Judicial Branch, State of Connecticut. ************************************************  Ashworth v. Branford ECKER, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part. One sign that something has gone wrong in our case law is that a legal precedent produces nonsensical results over time. The present case illustrates the dangers of following ill-conceived precedent off the proverbial cliff. A man who cannot stop thinking about an ex-girlfriend is admitted to a hospital. He reveals to the hospital staff that he is totally obsessed with her, he owns guns, and he is thinking about killing her, a pathological condition antiseptically known in psychiatric parlance as homicidal ideation. The patient is transferred to an affiliated psy- chiatric hospital, which then releases him within a mat- ter of days, with no warning to the girlfriend. Obsession fast becomes reality when, the very next day, the man murders the girlfriend and then kills himself. We hold today that our case law allows the killer’s estate to sue the psychiatric hospital for medical negligence but bars the victim’s estate from doing so—unless, perhaps, the victim happens to have been married to her killer at the time of the murder, in which case the statutory prohibi- tion somehow disappears. We are trapped in this thicket of unreason only because we must follow the court’s decision in Jarmie v. Troncale, 306 Conn. 578, 50 A.3d 802 (2012), which construes General Statutes § 52-190a to bar claims brought by a nonpatient for injuries or death caused by a health care provider’s professional negligence. See id., 587–89. In my view, Jarmie is a deeply flawed decision that has created an untenable doctrinal framework, leading to unjust results, based on a construction of § 52-190a that was never intended by the legislature. The problem is not only that Jarmie was wrongly decided at the time. Its long shadow has since forced this court to work around its erroneous holding in a string of subsequent deci- sions—including the present one—that sows further doctrinal confusion and inconsistencies. In the absence of a request to overrule Jarmie,1 the majority follows that precedent where it leads and, con- 1 The plaintiff is Angela Ashworth, administratrix of the estate of her daughter, the victim, Caroline Anne Ashworth. In her brief on appeal, the plaintiff makes only a generic request that we “limit or restrict  Ashworth v. Branford sequently, holds that § 52-190a bars the medical negli- gence2 claims brought by the plaintiff, Angela Ashworth, administratrix of the estate of her daughter, Caroline Anne Ashworth (decedent), against the defendant SVMC Holdings, Inc.3 I agree with the majority that the statute, as it was construed by a majority of this court in Jarmie, precludes the plaintiff, as a nonpatient, from bringing most of her claims against the defendant arising from the defendant’s alleged failure to comply with the profes- sional standard of care governing its duty to warn and to otherwise protect the decedent, an identifiable victim, from the foreseeable homicidal acts of Michael Mollow.4 I therefore concur in the result reached by the majority, which concludes that the plaintiff’s claims are barred to the extent that they are based on allegations of medical negligence. I write separately to explain why Jarmie any Connecticut authority contrary to the recognition of the cause of action sought by the plaintiff under the circumstances of this case.” Parties often make litigation decisions on the basis of existing law and, understandably, do not lightly assume that the overruling of precedent is in the cards, but a request to overrule precedent ordinarily must be fully briefed to be entertained by this court. 2 To clarify, I primarily will use the term “medical negligence” through- out this opinion to refer to a negligence claim against a health care pro- vider alleging a breach of the applicable professional standard of care. Medical negligence is professional negligence by a health care provider and means the same thing as medical malpractice. I therefore use the terms interchangeably. However, I caution that the latter term may be misunderstood to imply that a medical malpractice claim is a statutory cause of action in Connecticut. It is not. Medical malpractice remains a common-law claim describing a claim of professional negligence against a health care provider, and neither § 52-190a nor any other statute cre- ates a cause of action for medical malpractice in Connecticut. See, e.g., Escobar-Santana v. State, 347 Conn. 601, 624, 298 A.3d 1222 (2023) (“although procedurally circumscribed by statute, medical malpractice claims are [still] brought pursuant to the common law” (internal quota- tion marks omitted)). 3 The town of Branford and Christopher J. Donlin, administrator of the estate of Michael Mollow, are also defendants in this action. Neither Donlin nor the town is participating in this appeal because separate claims against them remain pending in the trial court. Accordingly, I refer in this opinion to SVMC Holdings, Inc., as the defendant. 4 I also agree that counts two through six of the complaint state a cognizable claim for “ordinary negligence” sufficient, under Jarmie, to survive a motion to strike. See parts I and II of the majority opinion.  Ashworth v. Branford gravely misconstrued § 52-190a and should be overruled when the opportunity arises. In addition, I dissent from that aspect of the majority opinion holding that count seven of the plaintiff’s complaint fails to state a claim of gross negligence. See part III of this opinion; see also part III of the majority opinion. I Before conducting the statutory construction that the majority in Jarmie neglected to undertake, I offer two introductory observations regarding the dubious prec- edential value of that case. These remarks are pertinent because the doctrine of stare decisis always deserves serious attention when precedent is challenged on the ground that it was wrongly decided. To overcome the force of stare decisis in the present case, I rely primar- ily on what I consider to be the overwhelming merits of the legal analysis pursued in this opinion. The following two preliminary considerations further diminish any concern about adhering to the holding in Jarmie based on § 52-190a. The first and most prominent of these points focuses on this court’s recent decision in Carpenter v. Daar, 346 Conn. 80, 287 A.3d 1027 (2023). Carpenter also involved the proper construction of § 52-190a and, of critical significance for present purposes, overruled this court’s decision in Morgan v. Hartford Hospital, 301 Conn. 388, 21 A.3d 451 (2011). See Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 84–87. Morgan had construed § 52-190a to impose a jurisdictional requirement, such that failure to timely submit a fully compliant expert opinion letter5 is fatal to a medical negligence action, however meritorious. See id., 100–103. It reached that conclusion even though 5 “Opinion letter” is the shorthand term used in our case law to refer to the statutory requirement of “a written and signed opinion of a similar health care provider . . . [stating] that there appears to be evidence of medical negligence and includ[ing] a detailed basis for the formation of such opinion.” General Statutes § 52-190a (a); see, e.g., Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 346 Conn. 84. The opinion letter must be attached to the plaintiff’s complaint in any action to which the statute applies. See General Statutes § 52-190a (a).  Ashworth v. Branford § 52-190a does not speak in jurisdictional language; see id., 105–107; and, by all accounts, the legislature’s inten- tion in imposing the requirement was merely to ensure an adequate, good faith investigation so as to eliminate frivolous cases. See, e.g., id., 124; see also Lynch v. State, 348 Conn. 478, 504 n.18, 308 A.3d 1 (2024); footnote 14 of the majority opinion. In overruling Morgan, the court in Carpenter unanimously concluded that the legis- lature never intended § 52-190a to transform “what the legislature intended to be a simple prelitigation docu- mentation of the plaintiff’s good faith inquiry into, in essence, a trap under which even meritorious suits are subject to dismissal.” Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 124. As I will discuss in part II of this opinion, Carpenter is only the most recent in a line of decisions holding that overly literalistic interpretations of § 52-190a must be eschewed in favor of more reasonable, commonsense constructions that comport with the purpose of the statute. See, e.g., Shortell v. Cavanagh, 300 Conn. 383, 388–90, 15 A.3d 1042 (2011); Dias v. Grady, 292 Conn. 350, 359–61, 972 A.2d 715 (2009). Carpenter is important because Jarmie is another Morgan era decision, and the majority in Jarmie was similarly and equally misguided in its construction of § 52-190a to impose more than prelitigation procedural requirements designed to prevent frivolous medical malpractice claims. After Carpenter, no viable argument remains that § 52-190a imposes any substantive limita- tions on such claims. Simply put, Jarmie erroneously read into a purely procedural statute a substantive bar prohibiting actions by nonpatients involving allegations of medical negligence. The second set of preliminary observations focuses on the fact that Jarmie adjudicated the statutory issue in an unusually casual manner, and its irregular methodology undoubtedly contributed to the flawed result. To begin with, the trial court in Jarmie did not purport to rely on § 52-190a when it struck the plaintiff’s complaint; nor did it conclude that the legislature has barred actions by  Ashworth v. Branford nonpatients involving allegations of medical negligence. See Jarmie v. Troncale, Superior Court, judicial district of New Haven, Docket No. CV-XX-XXXXXXX (December 31, 2008) (46 Conn. L. Rptr. 874, 875–76), aff’d, 306 Conn. 578, 50 A.3d 802 (2012). In their brief to this court, the defendants in Jarmie argued only in passing that § 52-190a barred the plaintiff’s medical negligence claims because of his status as a nonpatient. See Jarmie v. Troncale, Conn. Supreme Court Records & Briefs, March Term, 2012, Defendants’ Brief pp. 3–7. Their statutory argument covered one and one-half pages of their brief and consisted largely of quoting out of context a portion of Plainville v. Wheeler Clinic, Inc., Supe- rior Court, judicial district of New Britain, Docket No. HHB-CV-XX-XXXXXXX (December 11, 2008) (46 Conn. L. Rptr. 812, 813–14), in which the trial court construed § 52-190a to mean the very opposite of the result reached by this court in Jarmie. See Jarmie v. Troncale, Conn. Supreme Court Records & Briefs, supra, Defendants’ Brief pp. 5–6; see also part II A of this opinion. Of still greater concern is that the Jarmie majority adopted the defendants’ statutory argument by way of a truncated analysis incommensurate with the far- reaching implications of its conclusion that § 52-190a established a statutory prohibition against all actions by nonpatients involving allegations of medical negligence. The entire discussion in Jarmie spans a total of three paragraphs, and the court’s actual analysis of the statute is confined to a single conclusory sentence, followed by citations to three cases having nothing to do with the issue at hand. See Jarmie v. Troncale, supra, 306 Conn. 587–88. It is fair to say that the Jarmie majority did not engage in the usual methodology applied in Connecticut to construe a statute. More specifically, the decision does not mention Gen- eral Statutes § 1-2z or its common-law antecedents, and it neglects to apply the highly developed and entrenched principles of statutory construction that guide our analy- sis in virtually every case in which we are called on to determine the meaning of a statute. See generally id. In  Ashworth v. Branford Jarmie, that methodology would have required the court to consider as a threshold matter whether the statutory text and its context rendered § 52-190a ambiguous with respect to the question being addressed, namely, whether the statute prohibits a nonpatient from bringing a per- sonal injury or wrongful death action against a health care provider on the basis of allegations of negligence in the care or treatment of the provider’s patient. As I will discuss in greater detail hereinafter, Jarmie failed even to mention, let alone analyze, such key considerations as (1) whether a plausible alternative construction of the statute rendered its meaning ambiguous, (2) whether, applying established principles of statutory construction, that alternative construction was preferable, and (3) whether, in light of the ambiguity, the intended mean- ing of the statute can be ascertained by examining the legislative history of the statute, including the manner in which Florida’s appellate courts have construed the Florida statute on which § 52-190a was modeled. These methodological shortcomings extend beyond the internal mechanics of Jarmie’s statutory construction. Viewing the opinion from start to finish reveals that the court need not have reached the statutory issue at all. This is so because the majority in Jarmie concluded, as a matter of Connecticut common law, that the defendants owed no duty of care to the plaintiff; as a “random pedes- trian,” the plaintiff was not an identifiable victim of the alleged negligence. Id., 597. All of the plaintiff’s claims were consequently barred as a matter of law, regardless of any statutory considerations. Seen in this light, the entire discussion of § 52-190a in Jarmie is dictum. See, e.g., Honulik v. Greenwich, 293 Conn. 641, 645 n.5, 980 A.2d 845 (2009). I will not treat it as such in this opinion because this court has not done so, either in Jarmie or in subsequent decisions, including the present one, but the point remains that Jarmie’s precedential value is doubt- ful from the beginning because its statutory analysis was unnecessary to the outcome.6 6 The common-law analysis in Jarmie, although dispositive in that case, is inapplicable in the present case because, as the majority in this case correctly observes, Jarmie involved an unidentifiable victim to  Ashworth v. Branford To summarize these preliminary considerations, the Jarmie majority reached out unnecessarily to construe a statute that had not formed the basis of the trial court’s decision and was not necessary for resolution of the appeal, which, unlike the present case, involved an unidentifiable victim. The Jarmie majority nonetheless took the occasion to construe § 52-190a to foreclose, as a matter of law, a broad range of potentially meritori- ous third-party medical negligence claims.7 The Jarmie majority offered only the scantest analysis in support of its construction, the implications of which extended well beyond the narrow factual confines of that case. As I will further elaborate in part II A of this opinion, the Jarmie majority did so without acknowledging or addressing the plausibility of contrary constructions adopted by a court in Connecticut and one other jurisdiction (Florida) construing a statute identical to § 52-190a in all relevant respects. The flawed methodology inevitably led to flawed results. II A A careful review of § 52-190a reveals the inadequate nature of Jarmie’s construction of the statute. The whom no duty was owed under Connecticut common law, whereas the decedent in this case was an identifiable victim. Jarmie also arose out- side of the singular context of duties owed to third parties by mental health care professionals. 7 There are various species of third-party (nonpatient) tort claims predi- cated on underlying allegations of medical negligence. These include, without limitation, Tarasoff type claims; see Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, 17 Cal. 3d 425, 430–32, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (1976) (failure to warn or protect identifiable third party who may be at risk of being harmed by psychiatric patient); Cochran type claims; see Doe v. Cochran, 332 Conn. 325, 327–28, 351–52, 210 A.3d 469 (2019) (failure to notify, educate, or otherwise warn patient or identifiable third party who is at foreseeable risk of harm from con- tagious or communicable disease); Squeo type claims; see Squeo v. Nor- walk Hospital Assn., 316 Conn. 558, 560–61, 581, 113 A.3d 932 (2015) (claim of bystander emotional distress arising from patently and grossly negligent medical care); and claims alleging that a physician failed to educate a patient whose children were at risk from a heritable genetic disease. See, e.g., Pate v. Threlkel, 661 So. 2d 278, 279 (Fla. 1995).  Ashworth v. Branford language at issue is contained in the initial sentence of § 52-190a (a): “No civil action or apportionment com- plaint shall be filed to recover damages resulting from personal injury or wrongful death . . . whether in tort or in contract, in which it is alleged that such injury or death resulted from the negligence of a health care pro- vider, unless the attorney or party filing the action or apportionment complaint has made a reasonable inquiry as permitted by the circumstances to determine that there are grounds for a good faith belief that there has been negligence in the care or treatment of the claimant.” This language has remained substantially unchanged since the legislature enacted the original law in 1986, as part of what is known as Tort Reform I. See Public Acts 1986, No. 86-338, § 12 (P.A. 86-338); see, e.g., Daley v. Kashmanian, 344 Conn. 464, 482, 280 A.3d 68 (2022). The first thing to notice, even before analyzing the semantics and syntax of this provision, is that the statute imposes procedural requirements (the need to conduct a good faith inquiry and to obtain a presuit opinion letter from a qualified health care professional) on a certain category of professional negligence cases. See part I of this opinion (discussing Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 346 Conn. 80). It is now well established that § 52-190a, like the other components of the tort reform legislation relating to medical negligence claims, does not purport to effectuate any substantive or jurisdictional changes in the common law governing such claims. Our post-Jarmie case law explains that the statute “regulates pleading and service of process . . . [but] has been expressly construed . . . as having no effect on the standard for substan- tive liability . . . .” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 115; accord Corley v. United States, 11 F.4th 79, 87 (2d Cir. 2021); see also Dias v. Grady, supra, 292 Conn. 359. The Jarmie majority did not have the full benefit of these later insights regard- ing the procedural nature of the statutory scheme, but the precedential and persuasive value of the decision nonetheless is diminished by reason of these subsequent developments.  Ashworth v. Branford Turning to the statutory text, I note that there are at least three plausible ways to construe the relevant language. As we shall see, two of these alternatives were never considered by the Jarmie majority, and the third was insufficiently vetted. The first plausible reading, which I consider the best of the three, is the commonsense construction that Judge Patty Jenkins Pittman adopted in Plainville v. Wheeler Clinic, Inc., supra, 46 Conn. L. Rptr. 812, several years before Jarmie was decided.8 The issue in Plainville, which the trial court described as one of first impression in Con- necticut, arose in connection with a medical negligence claim brought by a police officer against a health clinic after the officer was injured while attempting to subdue a patient at the clinic. Id., 812–13. The plaintiff town alleged that the officer’s injuries were proximately caused by the defendant clinic’s medical negligence relating to its staffing and procedures, as well as its care or treat- ment of the patient. Id. The court reviewed the text and legislative history of § 52-190a (a), as well as the manner in which sister states such as Florida have construed similar statutes.9 Id., 813–14. Based on this analysis, the court concluded that § 52-190a governs only those medical malpractice actions that are initiated by patients; it simply does not speak, one way or the other, to actions brought by nonpatients. Id., 814. The second plausible construction resides at the other end of the spectrum. If one were to read the first sentence of § 52-190a (a) strictly, literally, and in isolation, the result would be to prohibit not only third-party medical malpractice actions but also a wide range of what we call “ordinary” negligence actions against health care providers. This construction would emphasize that the 8 For the sake of simplicity, I will hereinafter refer to this construction of § 52-190a (a) as the Plainville construction. I add one caveat to my endorsement of this construction in part II C of this opinion. 9 As I will discuss, the manner in which the Florida courts have con- strued that state’s version of § 52-190a carries special persuasive force in Connecticut because our legislature almost certainly modeled § 52-190a on the Florida statute. See part II B of this opinion.  Ashworth v. Branford statutory language, by its terms, does not speak of, and is not limited to, medical malpractice actions. Rather, the statute applies to any personal injury or wrongful death action alleging that the injury or death “resulted from the negligence of a health care provider,” a broad phrase that, on its face, sweeps in ordinary as well as professional negligence. General Statutes § 52-190a (a). The text purports to bar all such actions, unless they are supported by a letter from “a similar health care provider” opining “that there appears to be evidence of medical negligence . . . .” General Statutes § 52-190a (a). If we read the statutory language verbatim, and conclude, as Jarmie did, that the literal language of the statute permits only those claims filed by patients, then we must acknowledge that the same text also bars, at the very least, all manner of ordinary negligence claims brought by hospital visitors and other nonpatients; the first sentence would preclude everything from the type of claim that we allowed to proceed in Doe v. Cochran, 332 Conn. 325, 327–28, 336–38, 210 A.3d 469 (2019), to routine slip and falls. Indeed, reading the statute literally would preclude even those ordinary negligence claims brought by patients themselves, insofar as the first sentence of § 52-190a (a) bars any action alleging the negligence of a health care provider unless there is evidence of medical negligence. Although these two constructions provide the most natural readings of the statutory language, Jarmie failed even to mention, let alone adopt, either one. Instead, without any evident effort to consider other construc- tions that would make sense of the statutory scheme, Jarmie adopted a third, alternative construction of the statute, as if it were the only choice available. This con- struction reads certain selected portions of the stat- ute strictly and literally, while altogether ignoring any semantic or syntactic indications of a different meaning. Specifically, Jarmie’s interpretation of § 52-190a focused entirely on a single word appearing at the very end of the statute’s first sentence: “ ‘claimant.’ ” (Emphasis omitted.) Jarmie v. Troncale, supra, 306 Conn. 587.  Ashworth v. Branford The Jarmie majority observed that the statute requires, before the filing of an action seeking damages for personal injury or death resulting from the negligence of a health care provider, “ ‘a good faith belief that there has been negligence in the care or treatment of the claimant’ ”; (emphasis in original) id.; and concluded, without test- ing the proposition against common sense or considering any other standard tools of construction, that the word “claimant” must mean the plaintiff bringing the negli- gence action. See id., 587–89. Thus, because the statute stipulates that claimants are patients receiving care or treatment from health care providers, it follows that nonpatients cannot be plaintiffs in any action alleging medical negligence against health care providers. Quod erat demonstratum. As a cursory reading of the statute’s literal language, construed in a vacuum, this construction is plausible. However, it is by no means the only plausible reading of the statute, and its entire weight rests on the sudden and wholly unexpected appearance of a solitary word at the end of the first sentence. Nothing else in the statutory scheme gives any indication that the legislature intended to bar all nonpatient claims involving allegations of medi- cal malpractice against health care providers, and, if the court in Jarmie had consulted the standard principles of statutory construction, it would have realized that an alternative reading of § 52-190a was far more plausible. First, and most broadly, the court would be well- advised in this case to take heed of the admonition that “[the legislature] does not hide elephants in mouseholes.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Cyan, Inc. v. Bea- ver County Employees Retirement Fund, 583 U.S. 416, 431, 138 S. Ct. 1061, 200 L. Ed. 2d 332 (2018); see also, e.g., NEMS, PLLC v. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of Connecticut, Inc., 350 Conn. 525, 547, 325 A.3d 196 (2024) (“it is unlikely that the legislature would have enacted a sea change in [a statutory scheme] . . . without acknowledging that change”); New Haven v. Board of Education, 228 Conn. 699, 719, 638 A.2d 589 (1994) (“[w]e will not infer that the legislature intended to  Ashworth v. Branford enact a significant change in existing law without an unequivocally expressed manifestation of legislative intent” (internal quotation marks omitted)). If the leg- islature had intended to use the procedural vehicle of the good faith inquiry requirement to impose a substantive prohibition on all third-party actions against health care providers, surely, there were clearer, more direct ways to do so. Other Connecticut statutes make it abundantly clear when the legislature has intended to foreclose third- party liability for a category of plaintiffs, claims, or defendants.10 Of course, there is no requirement that the legislature use the clearest and most direct language possible when drafting a statute. But Jarmie reads a major, substan- tive limitation into a statute that, in all other respects, contains no provisions purporting to define or delimit the substantive components of a lawsuit seeking damages caused by medical negligence. Indeed, this same misstep was one of the primary reasons why we overruled Morgan in Carpenter. We explained that “the absence of jurisdic- tional language puts § 52-190a in stark contrast to other 10 See, e.g., General Statutes § 21a-286 (f) (“[a] prescribing practi- tioner or pharmacist who enters into an agreement [with a host agency to provide training to persons who will distribute or administer opioid antagonists for the reversal of opioid overdoses] shall not be liable for damages in a civil action or subject to administrative or criminal pros- ecution for the administration or dispensing of an opioid antagonist by the host agency who is a party to such agreement”); General Statutes § 31-221e (c) (4) (“[a] professional employer organization shall not be liable for the acts, errors or omissions of a client or of any covered employee of the client when such covered employee is acting under the express direction and control of the client”); General Statutes § 38a-78 (b) (7) (with certain exceptions, qualified actuary submitting opinion as to value of insurance company’s outstanding policies and contracts “shall not be liable for damages to any person, other than the insurance company and the [insurance] commissioner, for any act, error, omission, decision or conduct with respect to the actuary’s opinion”); General Statutes § 52-239 (“[t]he owner, licensee or operator of a visual or sound radio broadcasting station . . . shall not be liable for any damages for any defamatory statement uttered over the facilities of the station . . . by or on behalf of a candidate for public office or by any other person”); General Statutes § 52-572p (a) (“[a] product seller shall not be liable for harm that would not have occurred but for the fact that his product was altered or modified by a third party unless” certain circumstances exist).  Ashworth v. Branford statutes governing personal jurisdiction and the service of process in a wide variety of contexts”: Carpenter v. Daar, supra, 346 Conn. 105; and that “[t]he legislature’s failure to use the terms ‘personal jurisdiction’ or ‘service of process’ in § 52-190a, when it so readily uses those terms in other statutes in the same title governing civil actions, provides strong textual evidence that the leg- islature did not intend the opinion letter and good faith certificate to implicate the court’s personal jurisdiction.” Id., 107. In my view, it is not reasonable to believe that our legislature intended to wade silently into the waters inhabited by the well-known and controversial Tarasoff11 doctrine, to depart from the prevailing approach by categorically foreclosing such claims, and then to bury that policy choice in the connotative shadows of the final word of a procedural statute designed only to prescribe the contents of the good faith opinion letter that must accompany a claim for medical negligence. Second, we repeatedly have emphasized that “[s]trict construction does not mean that a statute must be read in isolation.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) State v. John F.M., 285 Conn. 528, 547, 940 A.2d 755 (2008). “[C]ontext matters in statutory construction, as do prac- tical consequences . . . .” Blondeau v. Baltierra, 337 Conn. 127, 137, 252 A.3d 317 (2020). Jarmie concluded that the statute established a substantive limitation, precluding actions by nonpatients involving allegations of medical negligence, on the basis of one single, iso- lated word. See Jarmie v. Troncale, supra, 306 Conn. 587–89. But a contextualized reading tells a different story. Section 52-190a is codified in chapter 900 of the General Statutes, which governs “[c]ourt [p]ractice and [p]rocedure.” The remainder of the statute is addressed to various purely procedural concerns, including the intricacies of the good faith certificate requirement; see General Statutes § 52-190a (a); and the availability of a ninety day extension to allow for a reasonable inquiry. See General Statutes § 52-190a (b). Neighboring statutes 11 Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, 17 Cal. 3d 425, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (1976); see, e.g., Plainville v. Wheeler Clinic, Inc., supra, 46 Conn. L. Rptr. 813 (discussing Tarasoff).  Ashworth v. Branford govern things like the proper form of bonds and recog- nizance for prosecution; General Statutes §§ 52-185 and 52-189; the routing of actions to the complex litigation docket; General Statutes § 52-190b; mandatory media- tion procedures; General Statutes § 52-190c; and the precedence of certain civil actions over others. General Statutes §§ 52-191 through 52-192. Not surprisingly, given the subject area, the word “claimant” is used in various contexts throughout chapter 900. The word “patient” is not. Similarly, “claimant” is used more than forty times in P.A. 86-338, the tort reform statute, with respect to various categories of torts, whereas “patient” does not appear a single time in the act. These observa- tions strongly support the notion that § 52-190a, like the statutes surrounding it, sets forth purely procedural rights, and the legislature simply did not consider that its use of the same word (“claimant”) throughout like statutes could, in this particular instance, be misunder- stood to have the unforeseen and unintended effect of foreclosing common-law actions in which the claimant is not the direct victim of negligence. A third, corollary principle is that statutory words are confined to the subject matter that the legislature had in view, and, therefore, we must be wary lest gen- eralized words such as “any” or “no” be given an overly broad, literal sweep that extends beyond the types of core cases that the statute was written to address. This is a canon of statutory construction with historical roots that reach back to the earliest days of the republic; see, e.g., United States v. Palmer, 16 U.S. (3 Wheat.) 610, 631, 4 L. Ed. 471 (1818); see also Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U.S. 457, 458–59, 12 S. Ct. 511, 36 L. Ed. 226 (1892); and it retains vitality today. See, e.g., Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528, 546, 135 S. Ct. 1074, 191 L. Ed. 2d 64 (2015); American Civil Liberties Union v. Dept. of Defense, 543 F.3d 59, 68–69 (2d Cir. 2008), vacated on other grounds, 558 U.S. 1042, 130 S. Ct. 777, 175 L. Ed. 2d 508 (2009). The principle has been invoked by this state’s appellate courts as well. See, e.g., State v. Salamon, 287 Conn. 509, 524, 540, 949 A.2d  Ashworth v. Branford 1092 (2008); Fairchild Heights, Inc. v. Dickal, 118 Conn. App. 163, 177, 983 A.2d 35 (2009), aff’d, 305 Conn. 488, 45 A.3d 627 (2012). Its application to § 52-190a helps us see that one way to understand the error in Jarmie’s reasoning is that the case construed the statute’s opening phrase, “[n]o civil action or apportionment complaint,” in the broadest possible sense, whereas the context indi- cates that the good faith certificate requirement was never intended to apply to actions involving allegations of medical negligence brought by nonpatients. But see part II C of this opinion. Fourth, statutes in derogation of the common law are to be strictly construed and should not be interpreted to limit or impair a common-law interest, unless “the language of the legislature plainly and unambiguously reflects such an intent . . . .” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Kumah v. Brown, 307 Conn. 620, 630, 58 A.3d 247 (2013). In Lostritto v. Community Action Agency of New Haven, Inc., 269 Conn. 10, 848 A.2d 418 (2004), this court explained that § 52-190a is “in derogation of the common law” and, for that reason, should be nar- rowly construed. Id., 37; see also Dias v. Grady, supra, 292 Conn. 359–60. Indeed, Jarmie itself acknowledged that our common law has been open to recognizing third-party medical negligence claims when the claimant is an identifiable victim of the negligent act or omission. See Jarmie v. Troncale, supra, 306 Conn. 594 (referring to “past cases in which this court has limited foreseeable victims of a health care provider’s negligence to identifiable per- sons”); id., 586 (“there [is] nothing in . . . the case law of this state that precludes the plaintiff from bringing an action against the defendants on negligence grounds”); see also id., 595–97 (discussing Connecticut common-law precedent involving identifiable victims). This principle of construction also counsels in favor of a meaning that does not produce a result in tension with the common law. With respect to professional negligence actions against health care providers in particular, common-law causes  Ashworth v. Branford of action by nonpatients had been recognized in many of our sister states prior to the adoption of § 52-190a. See generally F. Buckner & M. Firestone, “ ‘Where the Public Peril Begins’: 25 Years After Tarasoff,” 21 J. Legal Med. 187 (2000). Significantly, even after the enactment of § 52-190a, this court analyzed a Tarasoff type case with- out any indication whatsoever that the statute would stand as an impediment. See Fraser v. United States, 236 Conn. 625, 632, 674 A.2d 811 (1996) (rejecting claim by estate of nonpatient because decedent was not identifiable victim, “our decisions defining negligence do not impose a duty to those who are not identifiable victims,” and, “in related areas of our common law, we have concluded that there is no duty except to identifiable persons”); see also Jacoby v. Brinckerhoff, 250 Conn. 86, 96, 735 A.2d 347 (1999) (“To protect the integrity of the therapeutic relationship, we held [in Fraser] that a duty to disclose the substantial risk of . . . an act of violence would arise only if the third person was an identifiable victim or a member of a class of identifiable victims. . . . Such an exception was warranted, we held, in the event of an imminent risk of serious personal injury to iden- tifiable victims.” (Citations omitted.)).12 Prior to the enactment of tort reform in 1986, moreover, Connecticut also had recognized third-party professional negligence claims in other contexts. See, e.g., Licata v. Spector, 26 Conn. Supp. 378, 378–79, 383–84, 225 A.2d 28 (1966) (allowing third-party negligence claim against attor- ney and observing, with respect to rejection of privity 12 Notably, under Connecticut law, a plaintiff’s status as an identifiable victim subject to imminent harm gives rise to a duty of care when none otherwise existed, and that duty is sufficiently well-defined to overcome even the defense of governmental immunity. See, e.g., Grady v. Somers, 294 Conn. 324, 331–349, 984 A.2d 684 (2009) (discussing identifiable person, imminent harm, common-law exception to municipal employees’ qualified immunity and holding that such exception was not extinguished by codification of that immunity in General Statutes § 52-557n). See generally Sestito v. Groton, 178 Conn. 520, 423 A.2d 165 (1979) (deci- sion often cited as establishing identifiable person, imminent harm exception to governmental immunity). Jarmie thus reads § 52-190a to silently establish a newfangled immunity that is broader in scope than the immunity historically enjoyed by municipalities and their agents.  Ashworth v. Branford requirement, that “Connecticut was one of the states at the vanguard of this legalistic revolution”). Far from conducting an analysis in accordance with a clear state- ment requirement, the majority in Jarmie failed even to consider whether it w