Political Quotes

“I will be happy to try to respond to my colleague. First of all, by its very nature, these noneconomic damages are not quantifiable, so no one can say a particular amount is or is not warranted, which is to say of course, except we have put this decision in the hands of the jury. They are no more capable of divining a figure than the rest of us. We ask them to do it. We charge them with that responsibility, and they discharge their responsibility and, in many cases, do so very, very well. But these are very emotional cases, by their very nature. Ordinarily, the jury is well within the bounds of reason when it fixes the damage amount. We are only talking about those very, very exceptional cases, the less than 2 percent which exceed the half of a million dollars. So no one can say in one case it should have been $501,000 and in another case $499,000. But I think we should be guided by two or three different principles. First of all, we should understand that all of the economic damages are unaffected by this, so that with regard to the young man who has been confined to a wheelchair there would have to be a question about the loss of his earning power throughout the rest of his life, and he would receive damages for that entire sum of money. If he was building houses or something of that sort, his economic damages would be tremendous at that point, they would probably be in the millions and millions of dollars.…”