Punitive Damages Theory

US-CourtOfAppeals-10thCircuit-SealAlthough the Supreme Court’s modern due process cases have given lower courts a framework for deciding whether an award of punitive damages is excessive, some lower courts have been misapplying the Supreme Court’s guidance, refusing to disturb (or inadequately reducing) punitive awards that are much larger than necessary to accomplish the legitimate retributive and deterrent purposes of punitive damages.

Lompe v. Sunridge Partners, LLC, which is currently pending before the Tenth Circuit, is illustrative.Continue Reading Mayer Brown Submits Amicus Brief For Chamber Of Commerce In Tenth Circuit Appeal Involving Excessive Punitive Damages

directional sign USA statesThe Supreme Court held in BMW v. Gore that states may not use punitive damages awards to punish a defendant for the impact of its conduct in other states. BMW involved an obvious violation of that principle: The plaintiff introduced evidence of approximately 1,000 vehicles that BMW had sold around the country without disclosing pre-sale refinishing, asked the jury to punish BMW $4,000 for each vehicle, and then received a punitive award of exactly $4 million—1,000 X $4,000.

But in many other cases, the violation is more opaque. Sometimes evidence of the number of “victims” of the conduct is introduced, but the punitive award does not bear a precise or readily ascertainable relationship to that number. In other cases, the plaintiff doesn’t introduce the number at all, but merely emphasizes that there are many other victims around the country and then receives an outsized punitive award.

How then is a court to know whether the award constitutes impermissible punishment for harms suffered by out-of-state victims?

Continue Reading Using Supreme Court Commerce Clause Doctrine To Demonstrate That A Large Punitive Award Effects Improper Extraterritorial Punishment

Do Not Duplicate StampIn prior posts, we have occasionally adverted to the issue of multiple punishments in the constitutional context.  Just before the new year, a California appellate court issued an unpublished decision in Paletz v. Adaya bearing on a different aspect of the multiple punishment problem.  In Paletz, the Court of Appeal reversed an award of punitive damages as duplicative of an award of statutory penalties, concluding that the plaintiffs were not entitled to collect both forms of punishment for the same course of conduct.
Continue Reading California Court Of Appeal Holds That Plaintiff May Not Collect Both Multiple Damages And Punitive Damages For Same Conduct

Medical_Insurance_Concept_35162090A jury in the Western District of Louisiana made headlines last spring when it awarded a stunning $9 billion in punitive damages to a plaintiff who contended that the diabetes drug Actos caused his bladder cancer.  Last week, the district court cut the award by 99.6 % to approximately $37 million. Despite the impressive scale of the reduction, in our view the remitted award remains unconstitutionally excessive.  Furthermore, the district court’s lengthy opinion reveals significant errors of reasoning that we hope the Fifth Circuit will correct on appeal.  We address three of them here.
Continue Reading When Is A 99.6% Reduction Of A Punitive Damages Award Not Enough? When The Original Award Was $9 Billion And There Are Thousands Of Other Plaintiffs Seeking Comparable Awards.

It seems perfectly obvious, to this writer at least, that by far the most significant factor fueling the drive over the past several decades to ever larger punitive awards is evidence of corporate finances, and jury instructions and arguments that punitive damages should be set on the basis thereof.

Business people sitting next to gorillaThis post will explore the following elements of the issue: (1) Why is financial evidence such a dominating factor in many juries’ punitive damages calculus?  (2)  When and why did this reliance on wealth in setting punishments arise?  (3) What are the economic and legal fallacies that undermine the validity of this practice? and (4) Do the Supreme Court’s decisions in BMW and State Farm provide a viable basis for arguing against the prevailing judicial tolerance of the misuse of such evidence and argument?

While this post is unusually lengthy, the topic is one that requires extended treatment.Continue Reading Corporate Finances: Punitive Damages’ 800-Pound Gorilla