Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
    Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
    Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
    Ebook272 pages6 hours

    Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide

    By Cass R. Sunstein, Reid Hastie, John W. Payne and

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against cigarette manufacturers. Or consider two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights, and the environment, multimillion-dollar punitive awards have been a subject of intense controversy.

    But how do juries actually make decisions about punitive damages? To find out, the authors-experts in psychology, economics, and the law-present the results of controlled experiments with more than 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000 jury-eligible citizens. Although juries tended to agree in their moral judgments about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable dollar awards. The experiments also showed that instead of moderating juror verdicts, the process of jury deliberation produced a striking "severity shift" toward ever-higher awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; were influenced by whatever amount the plaintiff happened to request; showed "hindsight bias," believing that what happened should have been foreseen; and penalized corporations that had based their decisions on careful cost-benefit analyses. While judges made many of the same errors, they performed better in some areas, suggesting that judges (or other specialists) may be better equipped than juries to decide punitive damages.

    Using a wealth of new experimental data, and offering a host of provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic biases in jury behavior. It will be indispensable for anyone interested not only in punitive damages, but also jury behavior, psychology, and how people think about punishment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateDec 19, 2008
    ISBN9780226780160
    Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
    Author

    Cass R. Sunstein

    Cass R. Sunstein is the nation’s most-cited legal scholar who, for the past fifteen years, has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers.

    Read more from Cass R. Sunstein

    Related to Punitive Damages

    Related ebooks

    Law For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Attorneys Accused Of Acting Like ‘Loan Sharks’

      Nov 22, 2020

      TWO seasoned legal practitioners are required to show why they should not be struck off the roll of practising attorneys, considering the allegations of unprofessional and ethical conduct against them. Operating like “loan sharks”, charging exorbitan

      2 min read

    • Article

      Drivers Successfully Challenge Debt-based License Suspensions

      Apr 22, 2022

      LIKE MANY STATES, North Carolina punishes drivers with unpaid fines and fees by suspending their licenses. But as a result of a successful legal challenge to that policy, roughly 185,000 North Carolina residents may be eligible to have their driver’s

      1 min read

    • Article

      Supreme Court Lets Stand Ruling That Protects Homeless Who Sleep On Sidewalk

      Dec 16, 2019

      WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a major case on homeless, letting stand a ruling that protects their right to sleep on the sidewalk or in public parks if no other shelter is available. The justices without comment or a dissent s

      3 min read

    • Article

      Think Computers Are Less Biased Than People? Think Again.

      Oct 3, 2018

      Artificial intelligence is often billed as the answer to biased decisionmaking. But as long as people write that code, humans will have to wrestle with their own biases.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Supreme Court Halts Execution Of 'Texas 7' Inmate Denied Buddhist Spiritual Adviser

      Mar 29, 2019

      Patrick Murphy, who escaped from prison and participated in a robbery that led to a murder, was scheduled to be executed Thursday. The Court said he had the right to a spiritual adviser of his choice.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Parties Understand and Agree That by Entering Into This Agreement They Are Each Relinquishing and Waiving Their Right Under Applicable Law to Have Any Claim Decided in a Court of Law Before a Judge and/or Jury.

      Nov 27, 2017

      I. SISTER IRENE MORISSETTE ALWAYS LOCKED HER DOOR AT night. Maybe it was force of habit from her decades teaching at an isolated missionary school in Africa, or maybe it was, as she told a police detective later, just that she didn’t want “anyone co

      11 min read

    • Article

      Sandy Hook Victim's Father Wins Defamation Suit, Alex Jones Sanctioned

      Jun 18, 2019

      "Mr. Pozner has sought for years to try to get these conspiracy theorists to understand that his son really was a person and that his son really did die," attorney Jake Zimmerman told NPR.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Court Convenes: Healing and Justice Meet

      Sep 14, 2017

      "Even if you're the one charged, you will help create the answer." And the court has now come to order. The speaker is Colleen Sheehan, the presiding judge of the Restorative Justice Community Court, which opened last week in the Chicago neighborhood

      3 min read

    • Article

      Assuring The High Court’s Integrity

      May 4, 2022

      Outside the U.S. Supreme Court this week, passions ran high over the leak of a draft opinion that – if final – would overturn Roe v. Wade. Nationwide, those on either side of the landmark 1973 ruling quickly jumped into the bear pit of political comb

      2 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Be Rational

      Oct 3, 2021

      Let’s Be Rational
      8 min read

    • Article

      Our Moral Agenda

      Mar 14, 2021

      Our Moral Agenda
      4 min read

    • Article

      In Memoriam: Richard L. Stroup (1943–2021)

      Jul 18, 2022

      Rick Stroup was one of the founders of the environmental economics movement; he was a conservationist of the first rank. Conserving resources requires accounting for the opportunity costs of using those resources. But in the 1970s the focus of enviro

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Punitive Damages

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Punitive Damages - Cass R. Sunstein

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1