re: #101 sagehen

What’s especially nasty about that is that THE. WHOLE. POINT. of punitive damages is that it’s got nothing to do with whether the plaintiff “deserves” that much, it’s about how much do we have to take away from the defendant for him/her/it to really notice. It has to be PUNITIVE.

My favorite punitive damage was a bad faith insurance case back in the 1970’s — Colonial Penn was dicking around their policyholders, they refused to pay for a $48 hearing aid just because they thought the guy wouldn’t spend the resources to force them. The damage award was 2% of the company’s value. You can be sure that insurance company, and other insurance companies, made a real effort not to do that anymore (at least until they could get the law changed and damage caps).

Just to make this a bit more explicit, the whole point of GOP ‘tort reform’ is to completely end the concept of punitive damages.

Just what we need —- no restraint at all on the abuses perpetrated by BigCorps because any possible judgement will be completely negligible with respect to their bottom line.

In my opinion, if big business wants to cap damages, then they should lose the corporate shield and live with personal liability for judgements against the business.