Legal News

A Bad Day for Tort Reform, Georgia High Court Strikes Med-Mal Caps

By Ashby Jones

In the annals of the tort-reform movement, Monday, March 22, 2010 will probably not go down as one to be celebrated.

For starters, on Monday the world awakened to the reality of a new huge piece of legislation — the health care bill. And it’s a health-care bill without significant movement on medical-malpractice reform.

But the movement suffered another blow on Monday when the Supreme Court of Georgia struck down the state’s caps on pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases. The vote was 7-0. Click here for the opinion, here for the story, from the Fulton County Daily Report.

Chief Justice Carol W. Hunstein, in writing for the court, emphasized the separation of powers, that the state’s legislature had encroached on judges’ and juries’ turf. “The very existence of the caps, in any amount, is violative of the right to trial by jury,” she wrote.

The ruling follows a similar decision made last month in Illinois, in which the state’s Supreme Court held unconstitutional the state statute that placed caps on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases. Click here for a writeup on the Illinois case from Illinois-Kent law professor Ralph Brill.

In her opinion on Monday, Hunstein wrote that the caps violated the right to a jury trial because they require that a trial court essentially nullify a jury’s findings of fact on damages.

The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Michael B. Terry, told the Fulton County Daily Report that the single biggest predictor of how a state’s court had ruled on the issue in the case was the way the right to trial by jury was written in that state’s constitution. Georgia’s constitution says “[t]he right to trial by jury shall remain inviolate.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 23, 2010 (boomark / email).