Cyrus Dugger

The Supreme Court’s Crusade: Fairness for the Powerful

This editorial addresses the same topic discussed yesterday on Tort Deform by Professor Alan Morrison in What Is The Supreme Court Doing Deciding How Much Is Too Much for Punitive Damages?

October 26, 2006 Editorial Observer The Supreme Court’s Crusade: Fairness for the Powerful By ADAM COHEN

When Jesse Williams died of lung cancer, his widow sued Philip Morris, claiming it misled him about the danger of smoking. A jury agreed, awarding her $79.5 million in punitive damages. The Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the award, calling Philip Morris’s decades of deception “extraordinarily reprehensible.”

The United States Supreme Court is hearing arguments in the case next week, and the broader business community has joined Philip Morris in asking the court to sharply reduce the damages. They are relying on a controversial line of recent cases in which the court struck down punitive damages awards that it deemed “excessive.”

The Philip Morris case will tell us a lot about the John Roberts court, which may be the most pro-business court in decades. It is a test of whether the court will abandon its conservative principles to be activist and “rights-making” when the party that needs help is a large corporation. It will also reveal whether the court will continue on its current disturbing path of giving corporations more protection from excessive punishment than it gives to people.

The court began its punitive damages crusade in 1996, in the case of a man who sued BMW for failing to tell him that the new car he bought had been damaged and repainted. The man won $4,000 in compensatory damages and $2 million in punitive damages. The Supreme Court set aside the punitive damages award as so “grossly excessive” that it violated due process, but the court declined to lay out any clear standards for when an award was too high.

The guys at overlawyered.com and pointoflaw.com linked to and criticized Professor Morrison's earlier post, as well as a few others. Read both sides of the issue and decide which point of view you find most compelling.

If you or your organization is interested in learning more about or working on these types of civil justice issues, please feel free to contact me at cdugger@drummajorinstitute.org.

Cyrus Dugger
Senior Fellow in Civil Justice
Drum Major Institute for Public Policy

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