131 Nev. 792, 358 P.3d 234 (2015) · 131 Nev. Adv. Op. 80 · Decided October 1, 2015 · Nevada Supreme Court
An original writ petition to the Nevada Supreme Court, brought by the defendant physician after the district court ruled against him on the scope and validity of Nevada's statutory cap on non-economic damages. The court granted the petition in its entirety.
Following the death of Charles Thomas Cornell, Sherry Cornell — individually and as administrator of the estate — sued a number of defendants, among them Dr. Stephen Tam, alleging medical malpractice. Dr. Tam moved for confirmation that any non-economic damages would be limited by NRS 41A.035, which at that time capped such damages at $350,000 in an action against a provider of health care for professional negligence.
The Nevada Supreme Court held that the district court erred on three points.
| Question | What the court held |
|---|---|
| Is NRS 41A.035 constitutional? | Yes. The cap is valid. The district court's contrary conclusion, resting on the right to trial by jury, was error. |
| Does the cap apply per plaintiff and per defendant? | No. The statute limits recovery regardless of the number of plaintiffs, defendants, or theories of liability, so the cap is not multiplied across parties. |
| Does it reach medical malpractice, or only professional negligence? | Both. Reading the statute to exclude medical malpractice was error. |
The constitutional holding gets the headlines, but the per-party ruling is what changes case value. In a wrongful-death case with several heirs and several defendants, treating the cap as applying once to the action rather than to each plaintiff-defendant pair is the difference between a single cap and a multiple of it. Any Nevada exposure model built before reading Tam should be checked against it.
Tam construed NRS 41A.035 when the cap was a fixed $350,000. Assembly Bill 404 (2023) replaced the fixed figure with an escalating one. The holdings above are unaffected. The number is not.
| Effective January 1 | Maximum non-economic damages |
|---|---|
| Before 2024 (the figure in Tam) | $350,000 |
| 2024 | $430,000 |
| 2025 | $510,000 |
| 2026 (current) | $590,000 |
| 2027 | $670,000 |
| 2028 | $750,000 |
| 2029 onward | Prior year plus 2.1%, rounded to the nearest dollar |
AB 404, section 2, sets the base at $350,000 and directs that it “be increased by $80,000 on January 1 of each year beginning on January 1, 2024, and ending on January 1, 2028, when the amount reaches $750,000,” and by 2.1 percent each January 1 from 2029. The bill also requires the Nevada Supreme Court to publish the operative figure annually. The cap that governs turns on the date of the alleged negligence rather than the trial date, so confirm the year and the published figure before you rely on either.
Working a Nevada case where the cap is in play?
Upload the records and get a chronology with every finding cited to its exact page, the deviations from the standard of care, and the records still missing. Three case analyses are free, then $19 a case.
See a cited review first, no login →