Over the years, we have reported on many cases in which courts adhered to the Supreme Court’s guidance in State Farm (and Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker) that, when compensatory damages are “substantial, a 1:1 ratio of punitive...more
You’ve likely seen by now media reports about an Illinois federal jury’s $150 million punitive award against AbbVie in a case brought by a plaintiff who alleged that AbbVie’s low-T medication AndroGel caused his heart attack....more
We are excited to report that in late December Thomson Reuters released the fourth edition of the multi-volume treatise Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts. As in the first three editions, we contributed the...more
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in BMW of North America. Inc. v. Gore, the first time the Court had ever held that a punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive under the Due...more
The due process review of a punitive damages award for excessiveness has a number of interconnected parts. A series of relatively small errors can quickly add up and dramatically skew the outcome of a review process that is...more
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires procedural fairness in state trials, but that principle seems absent from a recent California Court of Appeal decision upholding a judgment against Kaiser Gypsum...more
As we have observed in a prior post, defendants in punitive damages cases often fail to develop evidence in mitigation of the amount of punitive damages, enabling the plaintiff to focus the jury on evidence about the...more
As we have noted in prior posts, many states require courts to bifurcate punitive damages trials upon the defendant’s request. The question therefore arises whether a federal court sitting in diversity must or, at least...more
The Missouri courts seem to provide more than their share of material worthy of comment. In Ross-Paige v. St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, decided on June 30, a jury had found for the plaintiff, a St. Louis police...more
Montana is known fondly to many as Big Sky Country, but it also is quickly gaining a reputation for big punitive damages awards. Not only are juries imposing breathtaking amounts of punitive damages with increasing...more