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The Decision To Award Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise, Nicole L. Waters, Martin T. Wells
The Decision To Award Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Michael Heise, Nicole L. Waters, Martin T. Wells
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Empirical studies have consistently shown that punitive damages are rarely awarded, with rates of about 3 to 5 percent of plaintiff trial wins. Using the 2005 data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Civil Justice Survey, this article shows that knowing in which cases plaintiffs sought punitive damages transforms the picture of punitive damages. Not accounting for whether punitive damages were sought obscures the meaningful punitive damages rate, the rate of awards in cases in which they were sought, by a factor of nearly 10, and obfuscates a more explicable pattern of awards than has been reported. Punitive damages were …
Taxing Punitive Damages, Gregg D. Polsky, Dan Markel
Taxing Punitive Damages, Gregg D. Polsky, Dan Markel
Scholarly Works
There is a curious anomaly in the law of punitive damages. Jurors assess punitive damages in the amount that they believe will best “punish” the defendant. But, in fact, defendants are not always punished to the degree that the jury intends. Under the Internal Revenue Code, punitive damages paid by business defendants are tax deductible and, as a result, these defendants often pay (in real dollars) far less than the jury believes they deserve to pay.
To solve this problem of under-punishment, many scholars and policymakers, including President Obama, have proposed making punitive damages nondeductible in all cases. In our …