Filing Proposed Points for Charge No Longer Suffices to Preserve Objections to Jury Instructions, Pa. Supreme Court Rules

Unless you were monitoring new Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings in the second half of August, you may have missed an important decision that changed how objections to a trial court’s jury instructions in a civil case must be preserved going forward. In Jones v. Ott, No. 12 WAP 2017 (Pa. Aug. 21, 2018), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by a sharply divided 4-3 vote held that, in the future, merely filing proposed points for charge without more will be insufficient to preserve an objection to a trial court’s contrary jury instructions.