[Eisenstein]

> It isn't just about lawsuits, it is also about damages payouts. In the US, there is a very broad constitutional right to a jury trial, which extends to civil lawsuits; and (in many cases) the law entrusts the jury, not just with deciding whether the plaintiff has factually proven their case, but also with awarding damages.

The big damages are punitive damages, not damages for compensation. Since we have rather lax consumer protection laws we rely on the companies being afraid of having to deal with a huge lawsuit payout if they act suitably antisocial. Like the McDonalds hot coffee lady only asked for medical bills, but because McDonalds corporate refused to give her those, and continued to keep coffee boiling hot regardless of people getting injured that they knew happened constantly, because it made them money, the jury made it a point to award a ludicrous judgement to teach them a lesson.

[skissane]

Yes, it is the punitive damages which are really astronomically insane. But even merely compensatory damages in the US can be extremely high by the standards of other countries.

For example, in the 2014 Florida case Cynthia Robinson v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, et al, the jury awarded US$23.6 billion in punitive damages as well as US$16.9 million in compensatory damages, for the death of the plaintiff's husband, a smoker who died from lung cancer at the age of 36. I'm sceptical any Australian judge would ever award US$16.9 million (at current exchange rates, AU$25.7 million) compensatory damages for a single person's death. The trial judge cut back the astronomical punitive damages award, but left the compensatory award intact. In the end, the plaintiff never got any of that money (the appeals court ordered a retrial, on grounds unrelated to the damages, and the defendant prevailed at the second trial). Still, I think it goes to show, it is not just high punitive damages, high compensatory damages is an issue too.

[Eisenstein]

Pointing out outliers isn't really helpful when talking about what could be expected in an insurance claim.

[skissane]

Okay, but the point also remains with respect to averages.

For example, compare how the UK and the US handle compensation for lost future earnings in wrongful death cases. In the UK, judges are guided by the "Ogden tables", actuarial tables published by the British government. The judge will use the deceased's age to look up a multiplier in the tables, which will be multiplied by their income at the time of death, to derive a net present value of future earnings. While the tables are technically only a guideline, and judges have the discretion to deviate from them, plaintiffs rarely succeed in practice with convincing judges to do so.

By contrast, in the US, there are no such formal guidelines – it is largely determined by expert witness testimony before a jury. Expert witnesses have a lot of scope to argue for higher estimates, and often succeed in convincing a jury with those arguments. The result is unsurprising – compensation for lost future earnings is more generous in the US than in the UK.

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28878/1/53.pd...

[Eisenstein]

I agree that the systems are different and one is more oriented towards payout because we have little to no social safety nets so whatever the victims get has to last them for life, among other reasons I described above.

Are you trying to say that one system is bad and another is good? They are different for different reasons, which can be explained by the structure of the society and what we expect courts to provide for us as opposed to other areas of government or private parties.

[skissane]

> I agree that the systems are different and one is more oriented towards payout because we have little to no social safety nets so whatever the victims get has to last them for life, among other reasons I described above.

The argument though is, a lot of the difference is nothing to do with the factors you cite such as social safety nets, it is about the use of juries in civil cases, especially to decide damages. David Bernstein (professor of law at George Mason University) puts the argument better than I can in a 1996 journal article – https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regu... – see in particular the discussion of juries on PDF pages 3 onwards, and his recommendation on PDF page 6 that state legislatures should remove the power to decide damages from juries and transfer it to judges only

[Eisenstein]

> The argument though is, a lot of the difference is nothing to do with the factors you cite such as social safety nets, it is about the use of juries in civil cases, especially to decide damages.

Why are you arguing this? For what purpose would it serve to give up the right to a jury trial in order to mitigate the extreme outlier cases which bump up the averages and which do not actually get any money into the hands of the plaintiffs? You want to destroy a constitutional right because... the tobacco industry got an unfair award, or because you think people are too dumb and swayed too easily by lawyers that we can let them decide life or death but can't let them decide how much money someone is owed?

Why take this position? What justice is it serving and why would society be better off for doing it?