As my colleague Andy Frey and I reported in an earlier post, an Illinois federal jury in July returned a $150 million punitive verdict against AbbVie without awarding the plaintiff any compensatory damages. That verdict is...more
Inevitably, when conscientious judges delve into the multi-dimensional issue of excessive punitive damages, they get some things right and other things wrong. Such is the case with the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in...more
A bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of California recently issued a decision that is sure to raise appellate eyebrows.
Concluding in In re Sundquist that the defendant bank had violated the automatic stay by...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
Although 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,...more