The considerations for an award of punitive damages can strike one as inherently subjective, especially those that govern whether a particular award is allowed by the United States Constitution, as determined in State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. v. Campbell (2003) 538 U.S. 408: (1) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant’s misconduct; (2) the disparity between the actual or potential harm suffered by the plaintiff and the punitive damages award; and (3) the difference between the punitive damages awarded by the jury and the civil penalties authorized or imposed in comparable cases. Because of this subjectivity, you might expect that an appellate court reviewing the constitutionality of an award…
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“Quoth the Judge, ‘Nevermore'”
If you have ever had the itch to write something like the title of this post into a brief, you might enjoy “What Lawyers Can Learn from Edgar Allan Poe,” one of the latest legal papers available from the Social Science Research Network. Will it really teach you how to write a brief that resembles a horror story? No. But the abstract does suggest it will teach you how to employ the elements relied on by Poe to write successfully. Here’s the abstract: Treat yourself to a spine-tingling Edgar Allan Poe sensation by reading about the synergy between stories of horror and legal writing. Poe defined a short-story writing technique…
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Blogroll Addition: “Courtoons”
Fellow Jones Day alumnus David Mills publishes a daily legal cartoon at his Courtoons blog, recently added to the blogroll under “Legal Humor Blogs.”