Professor Nora Engstrom weighs in on the defeat of Proposition 46, which would have raised CA's medical malpractice payout cap, and explains why CA's Supreme Court may still reconsider the issue in this Daily Journal article by John Roemer. 

Several former presidents of the state's tort lawyers bar, undaunted by a voter shellacking of an initiative to raise the medical malpractice payout cap, are pushing the group to try again.

The idea will likely be a hot topic at the Consumer Attorneys of California's annual convention, which opens Thursday in San Francisco, in the wake of the defeat of its bid to reform the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975, or MICRA, to raise the $250,000 limit on pain and suffering damages.

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Similar caps in other states – some more generous than California's – have been struck down in court, though such efforts have failed in this state. Stanford Law School Professor Nora Engstrom said attorneys still have a shot at reform, despite those setbacks.

“The California Supreme Court might choose to reconsider the issue, especially since the trend in other states has been to invalidate certain caps,” she said.