Supreme Court ends 19 yr. battle over Exxon Valdez

[Laozi]

This kind of got lost in the wake of its 2nd Amendment ruling.

 

$15,000 for having your life ruined seems a little light. Funny that Roberts and the liberal judges wanted to either defer to congress or let the lower court's decision stand.

 

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/26/nation/na-valdez26

Edited July 1, 2008 by Laozi

[Guard Dog]

Here is an odd case. The current martime law does not cover disputes at sea? How has this not come up by now?

 

Justice David H. Souter said the court decided the issue as a matter of maritime law. This in turn meant the justices themselves had to decide the law, because neither Congress nor the state has written laws to resolve disputes on the seas.

 

Souter cited several studies showing that punitive damages, on average, were no larger than the actual damages

[Enoch]

Actually, in maritime law, it generally is the Supreme Court's job to make the law. As part of the common law system we inherited from our English buddies, up until a century or two ago, most civil and criminal law was judge-made, established over the course of centuries by experience and precedent. All kinds of things like the elements of burglary, when someone's conduct is negligent, what a person has to establish to have a valid plea of self-defense, etc., were created via the common-law process. (States override this by statute, and with regard to most criminal law issues, they all have. But most civil law issues like the presence or absence of negligence are still decided by judges based judicial precedent rather than statutory law.) Admiralty law is no different in this regard-- absent a statute or treaty on-point, the courts get to decide what the rules are.

 

The Constitution gave the federal government exclusive authority over questions of admiralty law (so that ship owners wouldn't have to worry about the rules in 13 separate legal systems when trading among the states), which means that the Supreme Court is the ultimate decision-maker in the field. Congress could establish the rules by statute if they wanted to, but on this particular principle (the question of when punitive damages become excessive), they hadn't. Absent a statute to defer to or a piece of precedent to rely on, the Court had to make a policy judgment.

 

The standard they decided on was pretty arbitrary and quite pro-defendant, but keep in mind that these are only the punitive damages. The compensatory damages (i.e., the proveable economic harm that Exxon unleashed on the plaintiffs) have already been awarded. For particularly egregious torts, courts sometimes allow additional damages simply to punish the wrongdoer and deter future violations. Those damages are the only thing that this case was about.

[Guard Dog]

Interesting stuff, I did not know that.

[Enoch]

Yeah, this is easy stuff to miss unless you've either been to law school or follow state court decisions a lot. Admiralty is really a pretty unique field, because the SCOTUS doesn't often get to decide common law issues. It was decided a long time ago (in a case involving an accident on the Erie RR) that general common law is unique to each state. Thus, each states' supreme court is the ultimate authority on common law issues like contracts and torts. A party that loses on a purely common-law issue in a state supreme court has no right to appeal to the SCOTUS (and, even if they did, the SCOTUS has no power to overrule the state supreme court on those issuses).

 

Admiralty law is unique because it's a traditional common law area that the Constitution specifically gives to the federal courts alone. Now, there are other pseudo-common law fields of law that have arisen based on very broadly worded statutes. Antitrust is the best example-- the Sherman Act is so broadly and vaguely written (banning contracts or combinations "in restraint of trade") that virtually all of the rules of Antitrust law had to be derived by the courts through a common law process (and, because it's a federal statute, SCOTUS is the final arbiter on the topic). But technically, that's all statutory interpretation, rather than true common law.

 

Also, there is one exception to the common law tradition in America: Louisiana. The origins of its legal system are more French than English, which means that it relies more on statutes than judge-made common law.

Edited July 2, 2008 by Enoch

[Walsingham]

*hums Hearts of Oak*

 

I still think it's shocking that the company has got away effectively scot free. It's not like they're currently short of a bob or two.