Economic damages: the documented, countable losses
Economic damages are the straightforward, receipt-backed part of a claim. In an Oregon personal injury case, this generally includes medical expenses already incurred, lost wages from time away from work, property damage, and reasonably anticipated future medical care or lost earning capacity tied directly to the injury.
Non-economic damages: the subjective losses
Non-economic damages cover the losses that don't come with a receipt: pain, suffering, and similar nonpecuniary harm. These are inherently harder to quantify, which is exactly why the multiplier method exists — to translate a documented economic figure into a reasoned estimate of the non-economic side.
Why death and survival produce different outcomes
Oregon's wrongful death action is itself a creature of statute — it didn't exist at common law, and the legislature has historically kept its recovery limited. An ordinary bodily injury claim, by contrast, has deeper common-law roots and a correspondingly stronger constitutional "remedy clause" argument against a severe cap. That distinction is why the same $500,000 figure in ORS 31.710 has survived scrutiny for wrongful death claims while repeatedly failing as applied to ordinary serious injury claims.
Economic damages are never touched, either way
Regardless of which category a claim falls into, ORS 31.710 only ever limits noneconomic damages. Economic damages — medical bills, lost wages, lost future earning capacity — are never capped under this statute in either a wrongful death or an ordinary bodily injury claim.
The scale of the reduction that triggered the ruling
In the case that settled this question for ordinary bodily injury claims, the cap would have cut the plaintiff's noneconomic award from $10,500,000 down to $500,000 — a reduction the Oregon Supreme Court found too dramatic to survive the Oregon Constitution's remedy clause without some offsetting benefit to the plaintiff, which the statute didn't provide.