At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury. To warrant the award, the claimant must show that a breach of duty has caused foreseeable loss. To be recognised at law, the loss must involve damage to property, or mental or physical injury; pure economic loss is rarely recognised for the award of damages.
Punitive damages, or exemplary damages, are damages assessed in order to punish the defendant for outrageous conduct and/or to reform or deter the defendant and others from engaging in conduct similar to that which formed the basis of the lawsuit. Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some of the punitive damages in award.
Substantive due process is a principle in United States constitutional law that allows courts to establish and protect certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if they are unenumerated elsewhere in the U.S. Constitution. Courts have asserted that such protections come from the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the federal and state governments, respectively, from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Substantive due process demarks the line between those acts that courts hold to be subject to government regulation or legislation and those that courts place beyond the reach of governmental interference. Whether the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendments were intended to serve that function continues to be a matter of scholarly as well as judicial discussion and dissent. In recent opinions, Justice Clarence Thomas has called on the Supreme Court to reconsider all of its rulings that were based on substantive due process.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 is a United States labor law, passed in response to United States Supreme Court decisions that limited the rights of employees who had sued their employers for discrimination. The Act represented the first effort since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to modify some of the basic procedural and substantive rights provided by federal law in employment discrimination cases. It provided the right to trial by jury on discrimination claims and introduced the possibility of emotional distress damages and limited the amount that a jury could award. It added provisions to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protections expanding the rights of women to sue and collect compensatory and punitive damages for sexual discrimination or harassment.
A legal remedy, also referred to as judicial relief or a judicial remedy, is the means with which a court of law, usually in the exercise of civil law jurisdiction, enforces a right, imposes a penalty, or makes another court order to impose its will in order to compensate for the harm of a wrongful act inflicted upon an individual.
Penal damages are liquidated damages which exceed reasonable compensatory damages, making them invalid under common law. While liquidated damage clauses set a pre-agreed value on the expected loss to one party if the other party were to breach the contract, penal damages go further and seek to penalise the breaching party beyond the reasonable losses from the breach. Many clauses which are found to be penal are expressed as liquidated damages clauses but have been seen by courts as excessive and thus invalid.
Philip Morris USA v. Williams, 549 U.S. 346 (2007), 556 U.S. 178 (2009), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, which held that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits punitive damages, and ordered a lower court to reconsider its damages awards on that basis.
Cooper Industries, Inc. v. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc., 532 U.S. 424 (2001), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court involving the standard of review that Federal Appeal Courts should use when examining punitive damages awards.
Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, 554 U.S. 471 (2008), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court ruled in a 5-3 decision that the punitive damages awarded to the victims of the Exxon Valdez oil spill should be reduced from $2.5 billion to $500 million.
Browning-Ferris Industries v. Kelco Disposal, 492 U.S. 257 (1989), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable fines does not apply to punitive-damage awards in civil cases when the United States is not a party.
Gasperini v. Center for Humanities, 518 U.S. 415 (1996), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court further refined the Erie doctrine regarding when and how federal courts are to apply state law in cases brought under diversity jurisdiction. The Court held that the New York state rule applied.
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408 (2003), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court held that the due process clause usually limits punitive damage awards to less than ten times the size of the compensatory damages awarded and that punitive damage awards of four times the compensatory damage award is "close to the line of constitutional impropriety".
In the case of Sony BMG Music Entertainment et al. v. Tenenbaum, record label Sony BMG, along with Warner Bros. Records, Atlantic Records, Arista Records, and UMG Recordings, accused Joel Tenenbaum of illegally downloading and sharing files in violation of U.S. copyright law. It was only the second file-sharing case to go to verdict in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) anti-downloading litigation campaign. After the judge entered a finding of liability, a jury assessed damages of $675,000, which the judge reduced to $67,500 on constitutional grounds, rather than through remittitur.
Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company was a personal injury tort case decided in Orange County, California in February 1978 and affirmed by a California appellate court in May 1981. The lawsuit involved the safety of the design of the Ford Pinto automobile, manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The jury awarded plaintiffs $127.8 million in damages, the largest ever in US product liability and personal injury cases. Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company was one of the most widely publicized of the more than a hundred lawsuits brought against Ford in connection with rear-end accidents in the Pinto. The trial judge reduced the jury's punitive damages award to $3.5 million.
Ronald E. Nehring was a justice of the Utah Supreme Court. He was appointed to the court in 2003 by Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, and he retired in 2015.
Whiten v Pilot Insurance Co, 2002 SCC 18, [2002] 1 S.C.R. 595 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada decision on the availability of punitive damages in contract. The case related to the oppressive conduct of an insurance company in dealing with the policyholders' claim following a fire. According to the majority, "[t]his was an exceptional case that justified an exceptional remedy."
Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum is the appeals lawsuit which followed the U.S. District Court case Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, No. 07cv11446-NG.
The United States Constitution contains several provisions related to criminal sentencing.
Opati v. Republic of Sudan, 590 U.S. ___ (2020), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act with its 2008 amendments, whether plaintiffs in federal lawsuits against foreign countries may seek punitive damages for cause of actions prior to enactment of the amended law, with the specific case dealing with victims and their families from the 1998 United States embassy bombings. The Court ruled unanimously in May 2020 that punitive damages can be sought from foreign nations in such cases for preenactment conduct.
TXO Production Corp. v. Alliance Resources Corp., 509 U.S. 443 (1993), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, which upheld the decision of the West Virginia state court awarding $19,000 in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages to the plaintiff. Although multiple justices recognized that the punitive damages were 526 times the compensatory damages, the Court held a "general concern of reasonableness" should guide courts in determining constitutionally acceptable damages under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
