§ 72.053.Failure to Comply with Regulations or Standards

An admissibility gate for regulatory evidence, and it has two conditions.

"Regulation or standard" is defined broadly — a statute, regulation, rule, or order regulating equipment or conduct adopted by the federal, state, or local government or a governmental agency.

Evidence of a defendant's failure to comply is admissible in the first phase only if, in addition to other requirements of law:

(1) the evidence tends to prove that the failure was a proximate cause of the injury or death; and (2) the regulation is specific and governs, or is an element of a duty of care applicable to, the defendant, the defendant's employee, or the defendant's property or equipment where any of those is at issue.

The second condition is the substantial one. Motor carriers operate under a large body of federal regulation, and a violation of a recordkeeping or administrative rule proves nothing about a collision. Requiring the regulation to be specific and to govern the defendant or the equipment at issue excludes that material from the liability phase.

Subsection (c) preserves the rest. Nothing prevents a claimant from pursuing an exemplary damages claim under the damages chapter relating to the defendant's failure to comply with other applicable regulations or standards, or from presenting evidence on that claim in the second phase.

So regulatory non-compliance that does not meet the first-phase test is not excluded from the case — it is confined to the punitive phase, where it bears on culpability rather than on whether the collision was negligent.