South Carolina Casualty Study Guide

If there is one place where South Carolina departs from the national baseline hard enough to break a memorized answer, it is automobile insurance. This state makes uninsured motorist coverage compulsory, forbids arbitration clauses in it, lets you sue a driver nobody can identify, and attaches a conclusive legal presumption to one signed form. Add a workers’ compensation threshold with a genuine quirk in it, and you have most of the casualty state section. Let’s work through it.

Auto limits, and the coverage you cannot decline

Minimum liability limits — 25/50/25 under §38-77-140: $25,000 for bodily injury to one person, $50,000 for bodily injury to two or more persons in any one accident, and $25,000 for injury to or destruction of the property of others.

Uninsured motorist coverage is mandatory. §38-77-150 provides that no automobile policy may be issued or delivered in South Carolina unless it contains UM coverage at limits no less than the §38-77-140 minimums. This is the headline fact. In most states UM must be offered and may be rejected in writing. In South Carolina it is simply part of the policy.

UM property damage rides along — with a $200 deductible. §38-77-150(A) requires no less than $25,000 of coverage for injury to or destruction of the insured’s property in any one accident, “but may provide an exclusion of the first two hundred dollars of the loss or damage.” That $200 UMPD deductible is a pure South Carolina artifact and it shows up on exams constantly.

Underinsured motorist coverage is optional — but must be offered. §38-77-160: carriers “shall offer, at the option of the insured, underinsured motorist coverage up to the limits of the insured liability coverage.” Read the ceiling carefully. UIM is capped at the insured’s own liability limits, so a driver carrying 25/50/25 cannot buy 100/300 in UIM.

There is no PIP requirement. §38-77-144 expressly declines to mandate personal injury protection. Medical payments coverage is optional. South Carolina is a tort state, and the statute says so structurally rather than by implication.

The form that ends the argument

§38-77-350 is the most consequential single section in South Carolina auto law, and it is unusual enough to be worth reading closely. Insurers must use a form approved by the Director containing “a brief and concise explanation of the coverage” and “a list of available limits and the range of premiums for the limits.”

Then the payoff: if the named insured signs the completed form, “it is conclusively presumed that there was an informed, knowing selection of coverage.”

Conclusively presumed is not ordinary statutory language. It means the question is closed — the insured cannot later argue the offer was not meaningful, and no evidence to the contrary is admissible. That is why South Carolina agencies treat the §38-77-350 form as sacred paperwork, and why the exam asks about it.

Two more South Carolina-only auto rules:

Arbitration clauses in uninsured motorist coverage are prohibited (§38-77-200).

“John Doe” actions are authorized (§38-77-180). Where an unidentified driver causes the loss — the classic hit-and-run — South Carolina expressly permits suit against an unknown defendant so the UM claim can proceed.

Negligence — the 51% bar

South Carolina follows modified comparative negligence. A claimant recovers only if his fault is not greater than the defendant’s: at 50% he still recovers, reduced by his share; at 51% he recovers nothing. The rule comes from Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co., 303 S.C. 243 (1991), not from a statute — which is itself worth remembering, because a question may ask for the source.

Place it on the spectrum and it stays put: pure comparative (recover at any percentage) → 51% bar, South Carolina → 50% bar → contributory negligence (1% of fault bars recovery entirely). South Carolina sits in the common middle, one notch more generous than a 50% bar state.

Workers’ compensation — read the “or”

§42-1-360 exempts from the Act “any person who has regularly employed in service less than four employees in the same business within the State or who had a total annual payroll during the previous calendar year of less than three thousand dollars, regardless of the number of persons employed.”

The conjunction is the trap. It is or, not and. So an employer with five employees but a prior-year payroll under $3,000 is still outside the Act — a fact that looks wrong the first time you read it and is exactly why it gets tested. Part-time employees count toward the four.

Benefits — §42-9-10. Temporary total disability pays 66 2/3% of the average weekly wage, with a floor of $75 a week, capped at the average weekly wage in the State for the preceding fiscal year, and the compensation period may not exceed 500 weeks. The exception is §42-9-10(C): paraplegia, quadriplegia and physical brain damage carry lifetime benefits with no 500-week limit.

Filing deadline — §42-15-40: two years after the accident, or within two years of the date of death where death resulted. Occupational disease claims run from definitive diagnosis and notification; repetitive trauma runs from when the employee knew or should have known the injury was compensable, but never more than seven years after last injurious exposure.

The system is administered by the South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Commission, and employers comply either by buying a policy from a private carrier or by qualifying as an individual or group self-insurer. There is no monopolistic state fund.