Legal News

Georgia Supremes Ponder Legality Of Tort Reform

By Nathan Koppel

The Georgia Supreme Court yesterday heard a case that cuts to the core of tort reform.

The central question before the court: do the state's damage caps in medical malpractice cases violate constitutional guarantees of trial by jury, separation of powers and equal protection.

We don't know of another state high court that has tackled these weighty issues — separation of powers? — which perhaps have grown weightier now that Obama has signed off on possibly limiting medical malpractice cases.

In any event, here's the back story, as reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Betty Nestlehutt, a 75-year-old Georgian, suffered "gaping wounds" on her face after an allegedly botched plastic surgery. A jury in her medical malpractice trial awarded her $115,000 for her medical expenses and $1.15 million in noneconomic damages, including pain and suffering.

The rub is that the Georgia legislature in 2005 capped noneconomic damages in med mal cases at $350,000.

Georgia state court judge Diane Bessen declared the cap unconstitutional, prompting the litigants in the Nestlehutt case to head to Georgia's high court.

On Tuesday, Georgia Supreme Court Judges asked some hard-hitting questions about the damage caps.

Chief Justice Carol Hunstein, the Journal Constitution reports, asked whether the right to trial by jury had been rendered "hollow" in light of the state's damage caps. "No matter what [the jurors] state in their verdict, the plaintiff can't collect" pain-and-suffering awards north of $350,000, she said.

If the court were to uphold the damage caps, Justice George Carley wondered, could legislators next eliminate all noneconomic damages?

And Justice David Nahmais asked whether the legislature was equally authorized to enact damage floors, such as mandating that awards be at least $350,000.

The constitutional questions seem simple enough. Do legislative damage caps infringe on the independence of courts? And do noneconomic damage caps in particular violate the equal protection rights of women, retirees, children or other groups, who have relatively low employment rates and thus, arguably, are more reliant on noneconomic damages to be made whole? The answers to these questions, we suppose, are not so easy.

LB'ers, we implore you to help us make sense of the constitutionality of damage caps.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 16, 2009 (boomark / email).