A Study's Verdict: Jury Awards Are Not Out of Control
A comprehensive study of nearly 9,000 trials across the country has found that judges award punitive damages about as often as juries and generally in about the same proportions.

The role of judges in awarding punitive damages was "surprisingly prominent," the study found, adding that moves to limit punitive awards by juries "may be a solution in search of a problem."
The study, believed to be one of the largest of punitive damage awards, challenges widely held ideas about jurors' decisions that have influenced state judges, legislators, Congress and even the United States Supreme Court.

Jury punitive damage awards, which are intended as punishment, have been a focus of particular criticism because of occasional huge awards that critics say have no relation to compensatory damages, which are intended to pay injured people for their losses.

A draft of the study, provided by the authors, said that judges and juries each awarded punitive damages in about 4 percent of the cases in which plaintiffs won.

The study, to be published in March in the Cornell Law Review, analyzed court statistics on 8,724 trials in 45 large trial courts across the country. It was conducted by two Cornell professors, Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells, and three analysts from the National Center for State Courts, an independent research group in Williamsburg, Va.

By showing that judges and juries generally have similar views of punitive damages, the study suggested that juries may be far less arbitrary than is widely believed, said Neil Vidmar, an authority on jury issues at Duke Law School who was not involved in the Cornell research but was familiar with it.

"It is novel," Professor Vidmar said, "because the conventional wisdom is juries are irresponsible, incompetent and don't know how to make an assessment."

The study is expected to be controversial not only because it concludes that jurors may be more rational than they were believed to be, but also because it contradicts other research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/06/national/06LEGA.html?pagewanted=all