Utah: 312-Week Limitation on TTD Benefits is Constitutional

Utah Code Ann. § 35-1-65 (1982) (current version at Utah Code § 34A-2-410 (2016)), which provides that an injured worker who is temporarily totally disabled shall receive a specified amount of compensation per week, but that in no case shall compensation benefits exceed 312 weeks over a period of eight years from the date of the injury is not an unconstitutional statute of repose under the Open Courts Clause of the Utah Constitution, Utah Const. art. I, § 11, held the Supreme Court of Utah. Nor is it a statute of limitations. The only plausible challenge that the claimant for workers' compensation benefits could have raised was that § 35-1-65 was an inadequate substitute remedy for the loss of an injured employee's common law tort claim. The Court concluded that such a challenge failed, however, because the Utah Workers' Compensation Act—as a whole—was an adequate substitute remedy for the loss of such a tort claim.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Petersen v. Utah Labor Comm’n, 2017 UT 87, 2017 Utah LEXIS 203 (Dec. 1, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 80.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law