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 Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide
Cass R. Sunstein, et al
University of Chicago, October 2003
This collection of research by Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein and others
explains how and why juries decide what they do and why juries have a hard time
translating moral judgments into dollar amounts.
Synopsis (from Amazon.com):
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 the cigarette manufacturers.
More puzzling were 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
- specialists in psychology, economics and the law - present the results of controlled
experiments with over 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000
jury-eligible citizens. They find that although juries tended to agree in their
moral judgements about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable
dollar awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; 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. With a wealth of new data and a host of
provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic bias in jury
behaviour and should be valuable for anyone interested in punitive damages, jury
behaviour, human psychology and the theory of punishment.
When you buy Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide using the Amazon.com link above, a portion of the profits will go to support
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