overruling Southern Pac. Co., 180 F.2d 295 (9th Cir. 1950)
How later courts described this case
- overruling Southern Pac. Co., 180 F.2d 295 (9th Cir. 1950)
- taxes too speculative to be used to judge excessiveness
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
STEPHENS, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I dissent. There can be no monetary figure which really compensates for the loss of a limb and for the pain and suffering, both past and in the future, deriving therefrom. And we must view this case from the standpoint of compensation and not from any standpoint of punishment or resentment against the defendant or from sympathy for the plaintiff. While I fully realize the touchiness of a court’s interference with a jury’s judgment, I cannot believe that our system of jurisprudence places everybody’s material fortune, such as our free enterprise enables us to accumulate, at the unbridled whim of any twelve men and women no matter how good and true they may be. There must be some semblance of a basis for estimating the sum of money which one causing an injury must be compelled to pay to put the injured party in as good a fortune as he could be expected to be in had he not suffered the injury, plus, of course, a generous sum for pain and suffering.
Without such a basis reasonably applied I believe no judgment can validly stand. I cannot go along with the so-called “Monstrous” doctrine. It seems to me that by adopting it we give up all attempt to square the judgment with a reasonable basis for its support. I would think a million dollar judgment for the loss of a little finger would be monstrous (though I have none to sell at that figure) but I don’t know about a ten or twenty thousand dollar judgment. No injured person has the right to go to court for sympathy money — all the sympathy in the world is due the plaintiff herein but he is not craving sympathy.
Without an award for pure sympathy or from a corporation prejudice, I cannot figure more than sixty or seventy thousand dollars as justifiable in this case upon any jury instruction setting out a reasonable basis for measurement.
Judge -MATHEWS concurs in the dissenting opinions of Chief Judge DEN-MAN and Circuit Judge STEPHENS.