Should divided panels of federal appellate courts really be deciding state-law issues of first impression? That’s what happened last month in Lindenberg v. Jackson National Life Insurance Co. In Lindenberg, two Sixth Circuit...more
1/28/2019
/ Appeals ,
Bad Faith ,
Breach of Contract ,
Constitutional Challenges ,
Damage Caps ,
Death Benefits ,
Denial of Insurance Coverage ,
Insurance Claims ,
Insurance Litigation ,
Life Insurance ,
Policy Terms ,
Punitive Damages
In Gomez v. Cabatic, the New York Appellate Division, Second Department, affirmed the imposition of punitive damages in a medical malpractice case based on the defendant’s destruction of documents in an effort to avoid...more
In a recent decision in In re Paulsboro Derailment Cases, the Third Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a case brought by plaintiffs who alleged that they had been exposed to airborne chemicals following a train derailment....more
In 2015, West Virginia enacted a statute that caps punitive damages at the greater of $500,000 or four times the compensatory damages. We blogged about the statute here, explaining that the West Virginia legislature was...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
A couple of months ago, the Kentucky Court of Appeals in Grant Thornton LLP v. Yung cut a trial court’s award of punitive damages from $80 million to $20 million—reducing the punitive/compensatory ratio to 1:1....more
In recent years, St. Louis has done much to earn a place on the American Tort Reform Association’s list of judicial hell holes. Not content to rest on its laurels, the St. Louis circuit court grabbed the headlines again last...more
We have previously posted—for example, here, here, here, and here—about the thorny problem of avoiding excessive punishment when multiple plaintiffs seek punitive damages for the same course of conduct. Johnson & Johnson 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
McPadden v. WalMart Stores East, L.P., No. 14-cv-475, awarded more than $31 million to a former Wal-Mart employee who had worked for the company as a pharmacist. The plaintiff sued for discrimination and retaliation after...more
Last week, we posted about a $10 million award of punitive damages in a product liability action against a manufacturer of hip implants. We explained our view that the award was excessive, in part because hundreds of similar...more
We’ve been following the post-trial proceedings in Allen v. Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America, Inc., a product-liability action involving the diabetes drug Actos. The case garnered headlines earlier this year when the...more