Statutory Caps and Judicial Review of Damages

In this article, I examine two procedural questions arising from the use of statutory caps. First, how should a statutory cap affect judicial review of awards for possible excessiveness? Second, when a legislature has imposed a total cap on a combination of different types of damages (such as on the total of punitive and compensatory damages or on the total of economic and noneconomic damages), how should courts allocate multiple awards to conform to the cap? Courts have given a variety of answers to these questions. I contend that beyond imposing an absolute limit on plaintiff recovery, statutory caps should not alter normal judicial review of jury awards. Thus, a court should not be content to reduce an award to the statutory limit if that amount would otherwise be excessive on the facts of the case. Nor should a statutory cap be treated as a benchmark from which courts recalibrate jury awards, with the statutory limit reserved for the most egregious cases. With respect to multiple awards that exceed a total cap on different types of damages, I suggest that the appropriate way to conform multiple awards to the cap is to combine judicial review for excessiveness with plaintiff choice as to how to allocate the awards