States With Caps on Pain & Suffering Damages

By the FigureMyTax Editorial Team · How we calculate

Illinois didn't just strike down its damages cap once — it struck down two different versions, thirteen years apart, on two different constitutional theories.

Round one: special legislation

Best v. Taylor Machine Works (1997) struck a broad $500,000 cap that applied across all common-law actions — wrongful death, property damage, personal injury alike. The Illinois Supreme Court found it constituted impermissible special legislation, unfairly singling out certain categories of injury victims for a limit other victims didn't face.

Round two: separation of powers

When the legislature later enacted a narrower, medical-malpractice-specific cap, it required its own separate challenge. Lebron v. Gottlieb Memorial Hospital (2010) struck that cap down on entirely different grounds: separation of powers, holding that overriding a jury's noneconomic damages finding by statute usurps the judiciary's inherent authority to review verdicts case by case.

Why the second theory is harder to engineer around

The separation-of-powers objection in Lebron doesn't depend on how narrowly a cap is drawn or which category of plaintiff it targets — it's a structural problem with any legislative override of a jury's factual finding. That's a meaningfully harder bar to clear than the special-legislation theory in Best, which a more carefully drafted, broader-based cap might have been able to survive.

This is general information, not legal advice, and the state comparisons above are illustrative, not an exhaustive survey. Confirm the current rule in any state with a licensed attorney there.