As SCOTUSblog reports, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a very interesting and important new case on constitutional limits to punitive damages:
The Court said it would rule on two issues raised in Philip Morris USA v. Williams (05-1256). The first: if a court finds that a company’s misconduct was outrageous, does that override the constitutional limit that holds punitive damages closely to the actual harm done — the so-called “ratio” issue. [EV Note: This refers to the rule that punitive damages may not be more than some relatively small, likely single-digit, multiple of the actual harm.] The second is whether the Constitution forbids juries to provide damages to punish a company for the effects of its conduct on others, not directly before the court….
The case involves two rulings by the Oregon Supreme Court — one decided after the Supreme Court had ordered the state tribunal to reconsider its earlier ruling in the wake of constitutional standards laid down by the Justices in their 2003 decision in State Farm v. Campbell. In both of its decisions, the Oregon court upheld a $79.5 million punitive damages award to a woman whose husband had died of lung cancer. The punitive award far exceeded the $521,485.40 ordered in compensatory damages. The widow’s lawsuit was a wide-ranging attack on 50 years of Philip Morris’ conduct in marketing cigarettes, and the Oregon court ruled that the punitive damages could be based in part upon injuries it found had been done to many Oregon smokers, not involved in the case.
The company’s appeal said that each of the issues raised in the case arises regularly in punitive damages cases, and those questions have resulted in widely varying lower court rulings….
I should note that the firm with which I’m now affiliated (on a part-part-part-time basis), Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw, represents the tobacco company here. One of the reasons I joined Mayer is that they get involved in important, interesting, high-level cases like this one; congratulations to them on getting a certiorari grant.
I should also note that, when I blog about cases that I know Mayer is involved in (whether or not I am personally involved), I’ll disclose the involvement (much as other bloggers, especially the SCOTUSblog bloggers, have done).