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What Juries Can't Do Well: The Jury's Performance As A Risk Manager, W. Kip Viscusi, Reid Hastie
What Juries Can't Do Well: The Jury's Performance As A Risk Manager, W. Kip Viscusi, Reid Hastie
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Can juries handle complex cases? One way to frame this question in behavioral science terms is to ask: What tasks can juries perform well and what tasks will they perform poorly? Our basic precept is that the legal system should ask juries to perform tasks that they are good at performing and should not require juries to carry out tasks that they cannot perform well. A second guiding theme in our approach to the issue of jury competency is that the most relevant, most useful analyses of jury performance are based on empirical observations and data, not on rational analyses …
Why There Is No Defense Of Punitive Damages, W. Kip Viscusi
Why There Is No Defense Of Punitive Damages, W. Kip Viscusi
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This paper is a response to the comments by David Luban and Theodore Eisenberg on my article on punitive damages to be published in the Georgetown Law Journal (1998) and entitled "The Social Costs of Punitive Damages against Corporations in Environmental and Safety Tort." Neither of these authors presents any evidence indicating that there is a determent effect of punitive damages. They suggest, however, that there could be retribution objectives or other rationales for punitive damages. In addition, they claim that punitive damages are predictable and that cognitive biases may not tilt juries against corporations. This paper reviews these diverse …