Publication Date

2003

Publication Title

Supreme Court Economic Review

Abstract

Are juries rational or irrational? In the context of punitive damage awards, jury decisions suffer from serious problems. Jurors are intuitive retributivists, in a way that produces departures from economic theories of punishment. Their decisions are rooted in outrage, which they cannot easily translate into dollar terms. The result is a degree of unpredictability and incoherence. An understanding of this point casts light on several problems with existing institutions and offers some clues about how those problems might be solved.

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