§ 147.006.Immunity Not Affected

A neutrality provision on immunity: the chapter does not expand or limit the immunity of a person under any other law or statute providing immunity.

Both directions are named, and that symmetry is the point. A defendant cannot argue the chapter enlarged an existing immunity; a claimant cannot argue it cut one down.

The provision matters because the chapter is itself a set of protections, and a court construing it might reasonably ask how it interacts with immunities arising elsewhere. This says: it does not.

The two operate in parallel. A defendant with an immunity keeps it, and also has whatever this chapter supplies. A defendant without one gains nothing extra here.

It sits with two neighbours doing the same work in adjacent fields — the insurance coverage provision and the sovereign immunity provision — and together the three mark the chapter’s edges.

The drafting is characteristic of the whole chapter. It was enacted quickly, against an uncertain risk, and its authors repeatedly stated what it did not do rather than leaving the question open.

That instinct produced a statute that is unusually clear about its own limits, which is a virtue whatever became of the risk it addressed.