Why Judges, Not Juries, Should Set Punitive Damages

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...

Why Punitive Damages Don't Deter Corporate Misconduct Effectively

Judges, Juries, and Scientific Evidence

Do Punitive Damages Promote Deterrence?

The paper explores the deterrent effect of punitive damages when capital investment is endogenous to the legal rule. Irrespective of the level of damages, firms can reduce their expected liabilities by either increasing safety (the law’s intended goal) or reducing wealth exposed to liability. We show that punitive damages can exacerbate this wealth reduction effect and thereby reduce deterrence...

Punitive Damages and Valuing Harm