Guide · updated 2026-08-02
Caps a legislature still prints after a court struck them down
A damage cap can be held unconstitutional and remain published on the legislature's own website with no annotation. Florida's medical malpractice cap is the live example, and reading that page literally reports a limit that does not apply.
The Florida example
Florida Statutes section 766.118 sets limits on non-economic damages in medical negligence actions, ranging by defendant class and by the severity of the outcome. The Florida Supreme Court held the wrongful death caps unconstitutional under the state constitution's equal protection clause in Estate of McCall v. United States in 2014, and extended that holding to personal injury in North Broward Hospital District v. Kalitan in 2017. The section is still printed in the current statutes with no annotation saying so.
Why this is a data problem and not a trivia problem
Any process that reads a statute page and extracts the figure it finds will report that a Florida medical negligence claim is limited. It is not, and telling a claimant otherwise understates what the law allows. The same shape recurs elsewhere. Several states have had non-economic caps struck down by their supreme courts while the text remained on the books, and a handful have had caps reinstated or replaced afterwards, so the status of a printed figure is genuinely a per-state, per-year question. Our packs carry a struck-down marker for exactly this reason. Where a cap has been held unenforceable the figure is reported with its history and never applied to a result — because deleting it would be its own kind of wrong, and applying it would be worse.
Read the scope, not just the number
Two further details change what a cap does. Most caps limit non-economic damages only, leaving medical bills and lost earnings uncapped. Some do not: Virginia's medical malpractice limit is on the total amount recoverable, which is a materially different rule expressed in similar-looking words. And most caps are scoped to medical malpractice rather than to injury claims generally, while separate provisions cap punitive damages and claims against government defendants. A single figure labelled 'the cap' for a state is almost always answering a narrower question than the reader is asking.
Official sources for this guide
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