determining that due process is satisfied where a district court accords a jury’s punitive damages award “substantial deference” while “remit[ting] the portion of the verdict in excess of the maximum amount supportable by the evidence”
How later courts described this case
- determining that due process is satisfied where a district court accords a jury’s punitive damages award “substantial deference” while “remit[ting] the portion of the verdict in excess of the maximum amount supportable by the evidence”
- noting that the “Restatement, which provides the most persuasive evidence of the common law ‘as generally understood and applied in the United States,’ and which we are obliged to consult before exercising whatever common law authority we have in this case, does not preclude successive claims of punitive damages arising out of the same course of conduct, but instead permits consideration of the existence of multiple punitive damages claims against a defendant as a factor in accessing damages.”
- holding that the purpose of Rule 51 is served when objections to the jury charge give the trial judge an opportunity to correct the erroneous charge
- collecting state cases and noting that “both state and federal courts have recognized that no single court can fashion an effective response to the national problem flowing from mass exposure to asbestos products.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
BECKER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Judge Weis has demonstrated powerfully that the repetitive imposition of punitive damages upon Owens-Corning for failure to warn in connection with the same series of acts (the sale of asbestos products) has, in terms of the legal justification, for punitive damages, become so irrational as to offend the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I therefore join in Part II of his dissent. I note in this regard that the majority’s slicing of the punitive damages award from $2 million to $1 million in a single sentence on the grounds that “the district court gave insufficient consideration to the effects of successive punitive awards in asbestos litigation” is a testament to the force of Judge Weis’s argument.
I do not, however, join in Part I of Judge Weis’s dissent. The majority has convincingly demonstrated why we should not, in the exercise of our powers as the final expositors of Virgin Islands law, declare the repetitive imposition of punitive damages unavailable as a matter of Virgin Islands common law.
I respectfully dissent.