Punitive Damages – Love Them Or Hate Them

I missed this article posted at The American Lawyer on the never-ending debate over punitive damages. An excellent read.

Are punitive damages too high? Two leading scholars crunch the numbers- and come up with very different answers.

It might seem that a close look at the empirical evidence-the hard data on thousands of actual cases-would yield some answers. Two widely respected Ivy League academics, Harvard Law School’s W. Kip Viscusi and Cornell Law School’s Theodore Eisenberg, have spent years crunching the numbers. Their scholarship represents the gold standard of empirical work on punitive damages. The two scholars, however, come to wildly clashing conclusions.