Reading rule: This timeline separates enacted law, judicial holdings, executive action, and developing research. It does not turn an advocacy theory into a court holding.
Survival law
Florida’s survival statute provided that causes of action survive the death of the person entitled or liable, subject to the law’s terms. This is part of the baseline for later merger analysis.
Modern Wrongful Death Act
Florida enacted a comprehensive act declaring a policy of shifting wrongful-death losses from survivors to the wrongdoer and routing the action through a personal representative.
Kluger v. White
The Florida Supreme Court articulated the access-to-courts test used when legislation abolishes a preexisting right without a reasonable alternative: overpowering public necessity and no alternative method.
Medical-malpractice reform and repose
Florida acted amid a fast-moving insurance crisis. The resulting framework included an outside time bar and multiple insurance, screening, disciplinary, and study mechanisms. The project is reconstructing which alternatives were known, adopted, temporary, repealed, or later obscured.
Martin v. United Security Services
The Court held that when a personal injury causes death, the personal-injury action does not continue as a separate survival action; the recoverable elements are pursued through the Wrongful Death Act.
Carr v. Broward County
The Court upheld medical-malpractice repose against an Article I, § 21 challenge, relying on the announced 1975 crisis and concluding that no less stringent measure would solve the identified problem. Whether later evidence and alternatives alter that predicate is a research and litigation question—not an existing overruling of Carr.
Chapter 90-14 and § 768.21(8)
The same legislation that expanded specified noneconomic recovery for adult-family survivors in general wrongful-death cases withheld those damages when the claim was medical negligence. Committee discussion framed the underlying expansion in terms of equity and fairness, while the medical exclusion became the line now disputed.
Mizrahi upholds the exclusion
The Florida Supreme Court held that the medical-negligence classification survived rational-basis equal-protection review, relying on controlling health-care and malpractice-insurance costs.
Estate of McCall
The Court invalidated statutory caps on noneconomic damages in medical-malpractice wrongful-death cases. The opinions examined the evidence for the asserted malpractice crisis and the constitutional danger of allowing emergency predicates to become permanent.
Kalitan
The Court extended the equal-protection analysis to medical-malpractice personal-injury caps.
Santiago v. Rodriguez
The Second District recognized it remained bound by Mizrahi even if later Supreme Court reasoning called its rationale into question, and certified whether § 768.21(8) remained constitutional after McCall and Kalitan.
Repeal passes, then is vetoed
HB 6017 passed the House 104–6 and the Senate 33–4. Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed it on May 29, 2025. The statutory exclusion remained in force.
Repeal returns but does not become law
HB 6003 died in Senate Rules on March 13, 2026; identical SB 1700 died in Senate Judiciary. On June 18, 2026, the House transmitted the 2025 veto message to the Secretary of State. No repeal became law.
What the repose research is testing
Carr did not declare repose intrinsically constitutional in every future factual setting. Its reasoning accepted a specific crisis and the proposition that a sufficiently effective alternative was unavailable. The developing research therefore asks:
- What did regulators and lawmakers actually know about carrier concentration, rate filings, claims-made coverage, pooling, reinsurance, self-insurance, and mandatory coverage?
- Which parts of the 1975 package were intended to study or reduce the incidence of malpractice, and what did the resulting reports conclude?
- Did later insurance mechanisms address long-tail uncertainty more directly than extinguishing patient claims?
- Can an old emergency predicate remain conclusive after the factual conditions change?
- Does repose take on a different constitutional character when another statute made the underlying case economically or procedurally inaccessible before time expired?
Current status
As of September 2, 2026, both § 768.21(8) and the medical-malpractice timing provisions of § 95.11 remain in force. The constitutional and historical propositions discussed here are arguments for research, legislation, and adjudication; they are not a declaration that a court has already invalidated either provision.