ABSTRACT
‘Large punitive damages awards get attention’: an observation that remains as true today as it was twenty years ago, particularly in the United States. The cases excerpted in the chart below are just a few of the headline-grabbing punitive damages verdicts within the past five years. As the figures show, punitive damages can total in the billions of dollars – a significant recovery for plaintiffs and a serious punishment for defendants. But if these cases were brought in a civil law jurisdiction, like France, Germany, Italy, or even Louisiana, they would be non-existent. Likewise, an American plaintiff seeking to enforce these punitive damages awards in a civil law jurisdiction would be out of luck. Civil law jurisdictions (those that do not follow the Anglo-American common law model) have generally rejected punitive damages as contrary to public policy, an unjustified ‘windfall’ to plaintiffs of monies that they are not entitled to under the law. But the tide is starting to turn, and there are indications that civil law jurisdictions are ready to adopt this quintessential Anglo-American legal remedy of punitive damages …
Sossamon, Meera, Split the Difference: A Civilian Thesis for Punitive Damages (December 2023), 98 Tulane Law Review 219 (2023); Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Research Paper No 2024-05.
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