Statistical Instruction- Cornell Law School

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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?

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	Last updated: September 2002

Jury and Judge Trial Award Patterns

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

Question

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