Statistical Instruction- Cornell Law School

Home

Section 3:

Means and Medians

Trial Award Patterns

Probability

Standard Deviation
Normal Distributions
Logarithms
Awards Test

Standard deviation

Means and medians provide little indication of the “spread” of observations about the central figure.

The stream of numbers consisting of 10, 10, 10 has a mean of 10. So does the stream of numbers consisting of 0, 0, 30. The mean by itself oversimplifies, in the sense that it does not provide a measure of the difference between these two different streams of numbers.

The standard deviation does measure such difference. Very roughly speaking, the range from the high value to the low value of the stream equals about four standard deviations.

Table 1 shows that the standard deviation of awards in jury trials is noticeably higher than the standard deviation of awards in judge trials, for both compensatory and punitive damages. This means that jury awards show a bigger range, or more variation, than judge awards. We need not worry here about precisely computing the standard deviations, so accept them as given in Table 1.

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

	Cornell Law School	Cornell University
	Comments to ted@teddy.law.cornell.edu
	Last updated: September 2002

Standard deviation

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

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