A real but minority approach
Most US states use some form of modified comparative negligence — one that bars recovery once a claimant's own fault crosses a 50% or 51% threshold. Pure comparative negligence, the rule Alaska follows, takes that threshold away entirely. Thirteen states share this approach: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington.
A mix of large and small states
This group is a genuinely varied mix — it includes some of the most populous states in the country, like California, New York, and Florida, right alongside much smaller states like Alaska and Rhode Island. Pure comparative negligence isn't tied to any particular region or state size; it's simply the fault-allocation approach each of these states, through their own courts or legislatures, chose to adopt.
Not every state arrived at the rule the same way
The core principle is shared across all thirteen states — a claimant's own fault reduces recovery proportionally but never bars it — but how each state got there differs. Alaska's version came from its own Supreme Court first, in Kaatz v. State (1975), with the legislature only codifying the same rule by statute roughly a decade later. Other states in this group reached the same destination directly through legislation instead. South Dakota is a genuine outlier within the group: rather than a straightforward percentage-based pure comparative system, it applies its own "slight versus gross" negligence framework, a related but distinct variant of the same general concept.
The contrast worth understanding
At the opposite end of the spectrum sit the five contributory negligence jurisdictions — Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia — where any fault at all on a claimant's part can bar recovery completely. A claimant with identical facts and an identical degree of fault could recover a substantial portion of their damages in Alaska and recover nothing at all in one of those five jurisdictions. See our guide to how Alaska's rule compares to the other three fault systems for the fuller picture.
Why this matters in a disputed claim
Because none of these thirteen states has a threshold that can eliminate a claim over fault alone, a disputed fault percentage in Alaska changes the size of the recovery, but it never becomes the entire case the way it would in a modified comparative or contributory negligence jurisdiction. That doesn't make the fault question unimportant — it still directly affects how much a claimant ultimately recovers — but the stakes of losing that particular argument are meaningfully lower here than almost anywhere else in the country.