Only $28 Million

A California judge has ruled that a jury erred when it decided that Philip Morris should pay $28 billion in punitive damages to a former smoker who blamed the tobacco company for her lung cancer. Since the amount was more than all the punitive damage awards in California during the last two decades combined, this was not a tough call. The judge reduced the award to a mere $28 million, or 33 times the compensatory damages. What does it say for our civil justice system that an award can be reduced by a factor of 1,000 and still be absurdly high? In this case, of course, any award at all would have been absurd.