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Section 3:
Means and Medians
Trial Award Patterns
Probability
Standard Deviation
Normal Distributions
Logarithms
Awards Test
 

Jury and Judge Trial Award Patterns

For example, one important measure of a civil trial’s outcome is the amount of damages awarded. Awards can range from zero dollars (especially when plaintiffs lose) to almost unlimited amounts, such as the Florida punitive damages award of $145 billion against tobacco company defendants.

The following table (based in part on T. Eisenberg, N. LaFountain, B. Ostrom, D. Rottman & M. Wells, Juries, Judges, and Punitive Damages: An Empirical Study, 87 Cornell L. Rev. 743 (2002)) reports mean and median awards for state court jury and judge trials completed in 45 of the largest U.S. counties in 1996. It includes only cases won by plaintiffs that included a compensatory or punitive award.

Table 1. Jury and Judge Trial Award Patterns
(in thousands of dollars)

 
Mean
Median
Number of Plaintiff Awards
Standard Deviation
 
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Jury
Judge
Compensatory damages
1,047
152
45
25
3,001
1,375
34,200
979
Punitive damages
1,870
547
50
30
121
55
12,900
3,394

Our current focus is on the “Mean” columns (the first two numerical columns) in the table. They show substantial differences between jury trial compensatory awards and judge trial compensatory awards. Jury awards exceed $1 million on average and judge awards are about $150,000.

Question

According to your intuition, is such a difference likely to occur by chance?


      



 
Copyright © 2002 by Theodore Eisenberg & Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell University
Cornell Law School
Cornell University
Comments to ted@teddy.law.cornell.edu
Last updated: September 2002