The effects of limiting punitive damage awards

In response to concerns that jury awards in tort cases are excessive and un predictable, nearly every state legislature has enacted some version of tor t reform that is intended to curb extravagant damage awards. one of the mos t important and controversial reforms involves capping (or limiting) the ma ximum punitive damage award. We conducted a jury analogic study to assess t he impact of this reform. In particular, we examined the possibility that c apping punitive awards would cause jurors to inflate their compensatory awa rds to satisfy their desires to punish the defendant, particularly in situa tions where the defendant's conduct was highly reprehensible. Relative to a condition in which punitive damages were unlimited, caps on punitive damag es did not result in inflation of compensatory awards. However, jurors who had no option to award punitive damages assessed compensatory damages at a significantly higher level than did jurors who had the opportunity to do so . We discuss the policy implications of these findings.