## Facts

- A Georgia school bus owned by the Murray County School District and driven by Rhonda Cloer regularly crossed into Tennessee to pick up Georgia schoolchildren near the state line.
- On March 28, 2000, the bus collided with a CSX freight train at a railroad crossing located in Polk County, Tennessee.
- Seven minor children were on the bus; three were killed and four were injured.
- Multiple wrongful death and personal injury actions were filed in Tennessee against Cloer and the School District, among others.
- The School District carried motor-vehicle liability insurance with total coverage of $300,000 per incident.
- The School District sought partial summary judgment, asserting (1) two wrongful death claims were untimely under a one-year limitation period and (2) Georgia law capped the School District’s total liability for the incident at the insurance limit.

## Issues

1. Whether Tennessee’s one-year statute of limitations applied to bar two wrongful death claims filed against the School District in Tennessee.
2. Whether Tennessee choice-of-law principles required application of Georgia law limiting a Georgia school district’s motor-vehicle tort liability to the amount of its liability insurance coverage.

## Decision

- The Court of Appeals of Tennessee affirmed the trial court.
- Tennessee’s one-year limitation period applied as a procedural rule of the forum, barring two wrongful death claims against the School District.
- Georgia law governed the scope of the School District’s waiver of sovereign immunity for motor-vehicle negligence.
- The School District’s total liability for all claims arising from the collision was capped at $300,000, the per-incident limit of its motor-vehicle liability policy.

## Legal Principles

- In Tennessee, statutes of limitations are generally treated as procedural; absent an applicable exception, Tennessee courts apply Tennessee limitation periods to actions filed in Tennessee.
- A foreign state’s statutory limitation defining a public entity’s waiver of sovereign immunity may be treated as substantive and enforced by Tennessee courts when adjudicating claims against that foreign governmental entity.
- When a foreign public entity is sued outside its home state, choice-of-law and comity considerations may support applying the entity’s home-state immunity-and-waiver limits to prevent expansion of public liability beyond what the home state authorized.
- Under Georgia law as applied here, a school district’s liability for negligent use of a motor vehicle is limited to the amount of motor-vehicle liability insurance coverage in effect at the time of the incident.

## Conclusion

The appellate court held that two wrongful death claims against the Georgia school district were time-barred under Tennessee’s one-year limitation period and that Georgia’s insurance-based sovereign-immunity limitation applied, capping the school district’s aggregate liability for the incident at $300,000.


Lemons v. Cloer, 206 S.W.3d 60 (Tenn. Ct. App. 2006)