Opinion ID: 1704754
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Interpretation of the 1989 Amendment

Text: La. Acts 1989, No. 107, began as a Senate bill that simply prohibited a trial by jury in [a] suit where the amount of the cause of action does not exceed twenty thousand dollars [4] exclusive of interest and costs. In Senate Committee, the bill was amended to delete the words the cause of action does not exceed and to substitute the words no individual petitioner's cause of action exceeds. At the Committee meeting, the author of the original bill explained that the present law denies a jury trial where the amount in dispute does not exceed $20,000 and that the intent [of the original bill] is that a person who has a claim of more than $20,000 would be entitled to a jury trial, and if the claim is less than that, he would not be entitled to a jury trial. The senator who offered the Committee amendment then explained the amendment was to clarify that a jury trial is unavailable if no individual petitioner's cause of action exceeds $20,000. One purpose of the 1989 legislation, which is very evident from the insertion of the words individual petitioner, was to clarify that the monetary threshold cannot be satisfied by the joinder of two or more plaintiffs in the same suit, although La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 463 might authorize that joinder under the specified conditions. The amendment clearly requires that the unjoined cause of action of at least one individual plaintiff must be valued above the minimum amount. The more difficult issue is the determination of the purpose of the use of the phrase cause of action. That phrase has caused considerable difficulty in judicial interpretation over the years, especially when issues of prescription or res judicata were involved. See, e.g., Mitchell v. Bertolla, 340 So.2d 287 (La.1976). Although the Code of Civil Procedure does not define cause of action, the jurisprudence has offered several consistent definitions. In Trahan v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 314 So.2d 350, 353 n. 4 (La.1975), this court defined cause of action, in the context of an issue of interruption of prescription, [5] as [t]he juridical facts which constitute the basis of the right, [t]he immediate basis of the right which the party seeks to exercise, and [t]hat which serves as a basis for demand. Under these definitions, the term cause of action focuses on the conduct of the particular defendant in the occurrence or transaction which gives rise to the plaintiffs demand. In Everything on Wheels Subaru, Inc. v. Subaru South, Inc., 616 So.2d 1234 (La. 1993), this court stated that the term cause of action, as used in the context of the peremptory exception of no cause of action, means the operative facts which give rise to the plaintiffs right to judicially assert the action against the defendant. The case of Bullock v. Graham, 96-0711 (La.11/1/96), 681 So.2d 1248, was decided after the 1989 amendment to Article 1731(1). In Bullock, the sole plaintiff in the personal injury action alleged by amended petition that the amount in controversy did not exceed $20,000 (the monetary threshold for a jury trial at the time). The sole defendant (and its insurer) made the same stipulation by amended answer. The trial court determined that the plaintiff was entitled to $20,000 in general damages and $8,289 in special damages, or total damages of $28,289, subject to a reduction of forty percent for contributory negligence. The court therefore rendered judgment in the amount of $16,973 (total damages of $28,289 reduced by forty percent). On appeal, the intermediate court reduced the judgment to $12,000, calculated by viewing the amount in controversy as $20,000 and then reducing that amount by forty percent. 95-1050 (La.App. 1st Cir.2/23/96), 670 So.2d 806. This court, in affirming the intermediate court in a four-to-three decision, discussed the confusion caused by use of differing terminology. While Article 1732(1) refers to cause of action, the parties stipulated to the amount in controversy. With little discussion, this court concluded that the terms are synonymous as used in this case. Id. at 1250. Further reasoning that the plaintiff alleged freedom from fault and stipulated that the amount in controversy did not exceed $20,000, this court concluded that the most the plaintiff could receive, if free from fault, was $20,000, which must be reduced because the plaintiff was partially at fault. The court analogized the issue to the determination of federal diversity jurisdiction, in which the amount of the plaintiff's demand in the original complaint controls. On reconsideration, we repudiate that part of the Bullock decision which states that the term cause of action in Article 1732(1) is synonymous with the term amount in controversy. [6] The 1989 amendment changed the term amount in dispute (which is synonymous to amount in controversy) to cause of action. The terms obviously do not have the same meaning, and the Legislature probably intended some change. [7] In the present case, Allstate contends that the Legislature used the term cause of action in order to base the determination of the monetary threshold on the plaintiff's entire claim arising out of the transaction or occurrence. On the other hand, plaintiff contends that the term was used to base the determination on the plaintiff's claim against the particular defendant before the court at the time the right to a jury trial is litigated. The Legislature did not place a time frame in Article 1732(1) for determining the petitioner's cause of action. However, the problem in this casewhether amounts received in settlement must be considered in the determination of the monetary threshold for jury trialsexisted when the standard was amount in dispute, and the legislative substitution of the term cause of action did little to clarify a resolution of the problem. In judicially resolving the problem, we first note the overall legislative trends (1) to restrict, rather than expand, the right to jury trials; (2) to expand the jurisdiction of courts of limited jurisdiction in which there is no right to trial by jury; [8] and (3) generally to limit the availability of the more costly methods of litigating claims and to encourage more efficient methods, such as summary judgment. [9] It would undermine the overall scheme of the Code of Civil Procedure if we interpreted the legislative intent of the 1989 amendment as adopting an entirely different and broader concept by expanding the availability of jury trials, and we conclude that the Legislature did not intend such a result. In light of the legislative intent to restrict jury trial, we interpret the language change in the 1989 amendment as intended to focus, not on the amount of the plaintiff's overall claim arising out of the transaction or occurrence, as defendant urges, but on the value of the plaintiffs cause of action against the defendant or defendants who are before the court at the time the right to a jury trial is litigated. This interpretation is consistent with the jurisprudential expressions regarding the term cause of action, which place the focus on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff. This focus on the defendant is also recognized in La.Code Civ. Proc. art. 927, which authorizes a particular defendant to use an exception of no cause of action to challenge whether the law provides a remedy against the particular defendant, while the exception of no right of action in the same article is used to challenge the right of the particular plaintiff to bring the suit. Focusing on the particular defendant before the court in the present case, we note that plaintiffs cause of action against Allstate was based not only on the accident that gave rise to plaintiffs claim against the tortfeasor and his liability insurer, but also on the essential additional fact that Allstate issued UM coverage to plaintiff and agreed to pay damages when the tortfeasor was uninsured or underinsured. Thus, the amount of plaintiffs cause of action against Allstate, which was a separate cause of action from the cause of action against the tortfeasor and his liability insurer, was never over $10,000, either at the time of the accident, at the time of filing suit, or at the time the right to trial by jury was litigated. Indeed, plaintiff had no cause of action against Allstate to recover any amount greater than Allstate's $10,000 limits of liability. Accordingly, we conclude that the amounts received by plaintiff in settlement or payment from persons against whom plaintiff has a separate cause of action are not to be considered in determining the amount of plaintiffs cause of action against the defendant presently before the court. In reaching this conclusion, we recognize that this issue will be presented in only a limited number of cases, such as in the present case (and the Hurst case) against a UM carrier after the tortfeasor has settled or paid some amount. Another example was potentially presented in Cambridge Corner Corp. v. Menard, 525 So.2d 527 (La.1988), in which the lessor's claim for unpaid rent exceeded the monetary threshold for a jury trial, but was reduced after suit was filed. (The reduction was a voluntary remission by plaintiff of part of the claim in order to avoid a jury trial, but the same issue would have been presented if the reduction in the claim had resulted from a partial payment or settlement by the defendant of part of the claim.) [10] In the more frequently occurring tort case where a tort victim's suit is against two defendants whose concurrent conduct gave rise to one cause of action for damages, and one of the defendants settles prior to trial, the amount of the plaintiff's cause of action for damages against the remaining defendant remains the same, because the remaining defendant may be found by the trier of fact to be one hundred percent at fault. If the right to a jury trial is litigated, the trial judge, in determining the amount of the plaintiff's cause of action, is not in a position to assess degrees of fault prior to trial. [11] In the present case, we conclude that the amount of the plaintiff's cause of action against his UM carrier is $10,000. The lower courts thus correctly struck the insurer's demand for a jury trial.