Abstract

In the 2007 case Deer Valley Unified School District No. 97 v. Houser, the Arizona Supreme Court held that claims against the State must strictly adhere to Arizona's notice of claim statute, which requires that a claim "contain a specific amount for which the claim can be settled and the facts supporting that amount." While the Deer Valley decision created a powerful statutory affirmative defense for the State—entire cases could be dismissed for minor defects in the notice—it also created "confusion and uncertainty among claimants, public entities, lawyers, and state and federal courts."  The confusion, however, was short-lived. In the first few months of 2009 the Arizona Supreme Court published two opinions involving the notice of claim statute that, taken together, wipe out the State's questionable strategy of using the statute as an affirmative defense against injured citizen-claimants who may not have strictly adhered to the statute's requirements.

Ironically, while Deer Valley "abrogated seventeen years of case precedent that set 'reasonableness' as the standard to measure whether a notice of claim against a public entity satisfies the statute," City of Phoenix v. Fields and Backus v. State largely restore reasonableness to the statute's interpretation and application. Although the Arizona Supreme Court avoided an overt resurrection of the reasonableness standard it explicitly rejected in Deer Valley, the result is practically the same: a clear return to a reasonable interpretation of the notice of claim statute. For many Arizona practitioners, the result is a surprise.

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