Courting trouble

WHEN LAWYERS say, “hard cases make bad law,” what they often mean is that a sympathetic plaintiff or an unattractive defendant can induce judges to depart from a general rule that makes sense. The U.S. Supreme Court should resist that temptation in ruling on an Oregon jury’s decision to order a tobacco company to pay $79.5 million in punitive damages in a case involving a lifelong smoker who died of lung cancer.

Lawyers for the widow of Jesse Williams convinced the jury that Philip Morris had targeted people like her husband with a “massive, fraudulent campaign to sow doubt about smoking and disease” -- a campaign so effective that it could blunt warnings by the surgeon general. The jury then ordered the company to pay Mrs. Williams $821,000 in actual damages.

Fair enough, even though Williams had disregarded warnings from his family about the risks of smoking, realizing too late that “those darn cigarette people ... were lying all the time.”

But then the jury tacked on a punitive-damage award that was almost 100 times what it thought was necessary to compensate her for her loss. The jurors did so after her lawyer asked them to think about “how many other Jesse Williams[es] in the last 40 years in the state of Oregon there have been. It’s more than fair to think about how many more are out there in the future.”

Actually, the $79.5-million award was less than fair. In recent years, the Supreme Court has held that due process of law is violated when punitive damages -- admittedly designed to punish the defendant for wrongful conduct, not to compensate the plaintiff -- are “grossly excessive.”

In a landmark 2003 ruling, the justices suggested that punitive damages should be capped at nine times the amount of actual damages.

After Oregon’s highest court affirmed the jury verdict against Philip Morris, the U.S. Supreme Court asked lawyers for the company and Mrs. Williams to address two questions. One was whether Philip Morris’ “reprehensible” conduct overrode the requirement that punitive damages bear a reasonable relation to actual damages. The other was whether the Constitution allows a jury in a case brought by one individual to punish the defendant for the effects of its conduct on others.

Both questions seem like no-brainers in light of past decisions about the need for punitive damages to bear a reasonable relationship to proven harm. Yet during oral arguments Tuesday, several justices seemed to suggest that ambiguities in the record -- such as whether the Oregon Supreme Court had concluded that punitive damages could be based on harm to non-parties -- might require returning the case to lower courts.

Punting the case would be a terrible idea. As this lawsuit demonstrates, many lower courts are uncomfortable with the Supreme Court’s efforts to curb outlandish punitive-damage awards. An inconclusive ruling would embolden those courts in their resistance. It also would encourage speculation that recent changes in the high court’s membership have undermined its punitive-damage precedents. Two of the six justices in the majority in the 2003 ruling, the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, are no longer on the court.

Huge awards in individual lawsuits -- as opposed to sensible legislation -- are not the best way to curb smoking, obesity, gun violence and other threats to public health. The Supreme Court should see through the smoke screen of this “hard” case and say that.