I’m still struggling to conceal my disappointment over today’s Heller decision. Hopefully everybody caught another recent decision which I actually think is much worse, with far greater ramifications for our justice system.
Yesterday, in a 5-3 decision (Alito recused himself -- he owns Exxon stock), the Supreme Court reduced from $2.5 billion to $500 million the amount of punitive damages which could be awarded from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Their reasoning: punitive damages almost never exceed actual damages, and are usually much lower.
With this decision, we should never again tolerate accusations that liberals support “judicial activists,” who “legislate from the bench.” Here the Court came up with an entirely new rule: Punitive damages should cap out at a 1:1 ratio with actual damages.
Huh? I thought punitive damages were designed to make sure that extraordinary negligence or abuses received extra punishment as a deterrent. Surely Exxon Mobil, which let an alcoholic on a binge steer an oil tanker through ecologically-fragile waters, leading to an environmental disaster unmatched in recent history, represents that level of extraordinary neglect. If a Russian tanker had spilled that much oil into the waters of
We live at a time when environmental concerns should be front-and-center. Every American should be more familiar with the possibilities of cap-and-trade and tax-and-dividend policies for reducing emissions. And I suspect the Supreme Court is worried about the wave of litigation which (properly) will emerge in the coming years when environmental abuses in this country become more publicly-known. Today, every environmentally-unfriendly corporation received a de facto fixed cost for any future neglect. It’s very unsettling.
And it shows us who the real judicial activists are.
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