Punitive Posner

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution points to one of Judge Richard Posner's notoriously sharply-worded opinions [PDF], which also serves as a pretty good primer on the law-and-economics approach to punitive damages. I'm less convinced than Posner that "justice" is really just "efficiency" done up in voodoo and Pig Latin, but it beats the hell out of the SC's "I know it when I see it" approach to evaluating punitive damages.