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Cal. Civ. Code § 1431.2

Joint or Several Obligations

Applied in 111 court decisions — leading case 44 Cal. 3d 1188 - Evangelatos v. Superior Court (1988)

Most recently applied in Burch v. Certainteed Corp. (April 2019)

Added June 3, 1986, by initiative Proposition 51, Sec. 4

How often courts cite this section

1987199020002010201980
citing decisions per year

Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.

Several Liability for Non-economic Damages

(a) In any action for personal injury, property damage, or wrongful death, based upon principles of comparative fault, the liability of each defendant for non-economic damages shall be several only and shall not be joint. Each defendant shall be liable only for the amount of non-economic damages allocated to that defendant in direct proportion to that defendant’s percentage of fault, and a separate judgment shall be rendered against that defendant for that amount.

(b) (1) For purposes of this section, the term “economic damages” means objectively verifiable monetary losses including medical expenses, loss of earnings, burial costs, loss of use of property, costs of repair or replacement, costs of obtaining substitute domestic services, loss of employment and loss of business or employment opportunities.

(2) For the purposes of this section, the term “non-economic damages” means subjective, non-monetary losses including, but not limited to, pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental suffering, emotional distress, loss of society and companionship, loss of consortium, injury to reputation and humiliation.

Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.