Punitive Damages: How Judges and Juries Perform

Punitive Damages: How Judges and Juries Perform

A substantial recent literature has documented the inability of jurors to make sound decisions with respect to punitive damages, particularly for health, safety, and environmental torts. Included in this literature are experimental studies documenting the better performance of judges than jurors for the same case scenarios. Recent research by Eisenberg et al. (2002) has suggested, however, that...

Judges, Juries, and Scientific Evidence

How to Defend Punitive Damages Claims Effectively—and Maybe Successfully

A PUNITIVE damage award in a highprofile case is a corporate defense counsel’s worst nightmare. Consider, as examples, • $2.7 million punitive damages against McDonald’s Corp. for burns a customer suffered from a coffee spill; • $7.1 million for a secretary who prevailed in a sexual harassment case; • $101 million against General Motors in a design defect case; • $125 million against a pharmace...

Punitive Damages and Valuing Harm

Quilt Judges and Juries: Hard Questions