Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315: Fault, Damages, and Deadlines

Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315 is the state’s foundational tort statute: it says that every act of a person that causes damage to another obliges the one at fault to repair it.¹ That one sentence supports nearly every personal injury, property damage, wrongful death, and survival claim filed in the state. You generally have one year from the date of injury to file, and for injuries on or after January 1, 2026, a plaintiff who is 51 percent or more at fault recovers nothing.

What the Statute Covers

The language of Article 2315 is deliberately broad. It does not list specific wrongs or cap the situations it reaches. “Fault” carries the weight of the statute, and it takes in negligence, recklessness, and intentional wrongdoing alike. A rear-end collision, a defective product, a slip and fall, and a deliberate assault all live under the same rule.

The article also expressly authorizes damages for loss of consortium, service, and society, recoverable by the same categories of relatives who could bring a wrongful death claim if the injured person had died.¹ A spouse, parent, or child who loses companionship, affection, or household contributions because of the injury has a claim separate from the injured person’s own.

What You Have to Prove

The breadth of Article 2315 does not lower the plaintiff’s burden. Four elements must be established before a court will award damages.

Duty. The defendant must have owed you some obligation of care. Sometimes that duty comes from a specific statute, such as the rules of the road. Sometimes it comes from the general obligation not to create unreasonable risks for others. Duty is usually a question of law for the judge.

Breach. The defendant’s conduct must have fallen short of what a reasonably careful person would have done in the same situation. A physician is measured against a reasonably competent physician, a truck driver against a reasonably careful truck driver.

Causation. This has two layers. Cause-in-fact asks whether the harm would have happened but for the defendant’s conduct. Legal cause asks whether the harm was a foreseeable consequence. Running a red light is a cause-in-fact of the collision it produces, and the resulting injuries are foreseeable. Consequences that spiral far outside ordinary expectation can fail the legal-cause test.

Damages. You must have suffered actual harm. Without provable loss, there is no claim, no matter how reckless the defendant’s conduct.

Suing the Employer

You are not limited to suing the person who directly caused the harm. Louisiana recognizes vicarious liability, which holds employers responsible for damage caused by employees acting within the scope of their jobs. A delivery driver who runs a stop sign while on route creates exposure for the employer as well. The line is drawn at conduct that has slipped into a purely personal errand: a lunch stop during a delivery route usually stays within scope; a weekend fishing trip in the company truck does not.

What You Can Recover

Article 2315 supports both economic and non-economic damages, and, in narrow circumstances, exemplary damages.

Economic Damages

These are the losses you can document with a dollar figure: past and future medical bills, lost wages, reduced earning capacity, property repair or replacement, and out-of-pocket costs such as home modifications after a disabling injury. Records carry these claims. Hospital bills, pay stubs, and expert projections for future losses are what makes them hard to dispute.

Non-Economic Damages

Pain, mental anguish, emotional distress, scarring, and loss of enjoyment of life fall here. No formula converts suffering into money. Juries weigh the severity and duration of the harm and its effect on daily life. Louisiana does not impose a statutory cap on non-economic damages in ordinary tort cases.

Loss of Consortium

The article itself authorizes recovery for loss of consortium, service, and society.¹ A spouse who can no longer share daily activities, physical intimacy, or household responsibilities with an injured partner has an independent claim. The same beneficiary classes eligible for a wrongful death claim can pursue consortium damages when the injured person survives.

Exemplary Damages

Louisiana generally does not allow punitive damages. The exceptions are set out in specific statutes. Article 2315.4 permits exemplary damages when injuries resulted from a driver whose intoxication showed wanton or reckless disregard for the safety of others.² Article 2315.3 allows exemplary damages for injuries arising from child sexual abuse materials.³ These awards punish outrageous conduct rather than compensate the plaintiff, and, as discussed below, they are fully taxable.

Boundary: Medical Malpractice Claims

If the claim arises from medical malpractice by a qualified healthcare provider enrolled in the Louisiana Patient’s Compensation Fund, a separate statutory scheme replaces the usual rules. Total recoverable damages, other than future medical care, are capped at $500,000, plus interest and costs.⁴ Future medical expenses are paid separately from the Fund and are not subject to the cap. The cap applies per patient and combines economic and non-economic damages, so a $2 million verdict would be reduced to $500,000 for everything other than future medical care. Medical malpractice claims also have their own prescriptive rules.

The 2026 Comparative Fault Rule

For injuries occurring on or after January 1, 2026, a plaintiff whose share of fault is 51 percent or more recovers nothing under the amended Article 2323.⁵ If your share is 50 percent or less, your recovery is reduced by your percentage. A plaintiff 30 percent at fault on a $100,000 claim collects $70,000. The prior system allowed reduced recovery even at 99 percent fault, so this is a meaningful change.

One exception matters: damages are not reduced at all when the defendant committed an intentional tort.⁵ If someone deliberately assaults you while you happen to be trespassing, the court will not shave your recovery based on the trespass.

Courts assign fault percentages to every person who contributed to the harm, including people who are not parties, are immune from suit, or are unknown. That allocation drives how much each defendant pays.

When More Than One Person Is at Fault

How much you can collect from each defendant depends on whether they acted intentionally together. If two or more defendants conspired to commit an intentional act, they are liable in solido, meaning you can collect the entire judgment from any one of them, who then chases the others for their shares.⁶

In every other multi-defendant case, which is the overwhelming majority, liability is joint and divisible. Each defendant is responsible only for the percentage of fault assigned to them and cannot be forced to cover another defendant’s share, even if that other defendant is uninsured or judgment-proof.⁶ If a 70 percent defendant has no assets, that portion of the loss is yours. Identifying every potentially liable party early carries more weight in Louisiana than in states using traditional joint and several liability.

Wrongful Death and Survival Actions

When someone dies from another’s fault, two distinct claims arise under companion articles. Confusing them is one of the most common mistakes families make.

Wrongful Death Under Article 2315.2

A wrongful death action compensates surviving family members for what they lost because of the death: financial support, companionship, guidance, and funeral costs. The statute creates a strict priority list:⁷

Surviving spouse and children, or either alone.
Surviving parents, if no spouse or child survives.
Surviving siblings, if no spouse, child, or parent survives.
Surviving grandparents, if no closer relative survives.

Only the highest-priority group with living members can file. If the deceased left a spouse and children, parents and siblings have no claim. The deadline is one year from the death or two years from the date of injury, whichever gives more time.⁷

Survival Action Under Article 2315.1

A survival action recovers the damages the deceased suffered between the injury and death: medical bills, lost earnings during that period, conscious pain, and property damage. The money goes to the estate rather than directly to family. The same beneficiary hierarchy applies, and the estate representative can file if no statutory beneficiary exists. The prescriptive period matches the wrongful death rule: one year from death or two years from injury, whichever is longer.⁸

Defenses Defendants Use

The most effective defense in many cases is simply arguing the plaintiff’s own fault exceeds 50 percent, because the comparative-fault bar handles the rest. Several specific defenses also appear regularly.

Assumption of risk is largely folded into comparative fault in Louisiana. It usually affects the fault percentage assigned to the plaintiff rather than serving as a total bar. Someone who participates in a contact sport accepts the ordinary risks of the game.

Sudden emergency shifts the standard of care when a defendant faced an unexpected, split-second crisis. A driver who swerves into a ditch to avoid a child in the road is not measured against calm-highway conduct. The defense fails when the defendant created the emergency.

Governmental immunity protects public entities and their employees from liability for discretionary or policymaking acts within the scope of lawful duties. A government engineer choosing where to place a traffic signal is making a policy judgment and is generally immune. A road crew failing to sign an open trench is performing a routine operational task and is not. The immunity also disappears when the conduct is criminal, fraudulent, malicious, intentional, or reckless, or when it is not reasonably related to a legitimate governmental purpose.⁹

The One-Year Filing Deadline

Louisiana has one of the shortest filing deadlines in the country. For most tort claims under Article 2315, you have one year from the date the injury was sustained.¹⁰ Louisiana calls this prescription rather than a statute of limitations, but the effect is the same: miss the deadline and the claim is dead regardless of its merits.

Wrongful death and survival actions run on a slightly different clock: one year from the death or two years from the date of injury, whichever is longer.⁷ Medical malpractice has its own prescriptive period. Prescription generally does not run against minors or people under interdiction in product liability cases, but those exceptions are narrow. Anywhere close to the one-year mark, treat it as an emergency.

What Happens After a Recovery

Taxes on the Award

Settlement money is not automatically tax-free. Compensatory damages received on account of a personal physical injury or physical sickness are excluded from gross income under IRC Section 104(a)(2). That covers medical expense reimbursement, pain and suffering, and even lost wages, as long as the underlying claim is rooted in a physical injury.¹¹

Damages for emotional distress or mental anguish that do not stem from a physical injury are taxable. You can exclude amounts that reimburse actual medical expenses for emotional-distress treatment, but only if you did not deduct those expenses on a prior return.¹¹

Punitive and exemplary damages are always taxable, with a narrow exception for wrongful death awards in states where the only available remedy is punitive damages. Louisiana allows compensatory wrongful death recovery, so that exception does not apply here.¹¹ How a settlement agreement allocates the payment among these categories directly controls the tax result, so the language of the document deserves the same attention as the dollar figure.

Medicare and Health-Plan Liens

If Medicare paid for treatment related to your injury, it has a statutory right to reimbursement out of your recovery. The claim must be reported through the Medicare Secondary Payer Recovery Portal or by contacting the Benefits Coordination and Recovery Center, after which Medicare calculates its repayment amount.¹² In some situations a fixed-percentage repayment option is available.

Private health plans governed by ERISA often carry similar subrogation clauses. If your employer-sponsored plan paid your medical bills and its documents include subrogation, the plan can demand reimbursement from your tort recovery. Settling without accounting for these liens can leave you personally liable for the amounts the plan paid.

1
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315 – Liability for Acts Causing Damages
2
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315.4 – Additional Damages; Intoxicated Defendant
3
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315.3 – Additional Damages; Child Pornography; Child Sexual Abuse Materials
4
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Revised Statutes 40:1231.2
5
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2323 – Comparative Fault
6
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2324 – Liability as Solidary or Joint and Divisible Obligation
7
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315.2 – Wrongful Death Action
8
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Civil Code Article 2315.1 – Survival Action
9
Louisiana State Legislature. Louisiana Revised Statutes 9:2798.1 – Policymaking or Discretionary Acts or Omissions of Public Entities
10
Justia. Louisiana Civil Code Article 3492 – Delictual Actions
11
Internal Revenue Service. Tax Implications of Settlements and Judgments
12
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Reporting a Case