Punitive damages

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In Anglo-American law is meant Punitive damages a compensation , which in civil proceedings a plaintiff on the suffered actual damage is awarded addition. In Germany, the term punitive damages has become common practice, in the Anglo-Saxon legal area one speaks of exemplary damages .

The purpose is

  1. punish the defendant for his conduct;
  2. prevent him from repeating this illegal behavior ( special prevention );
  3. to prevent others from doing so ( general prevention ).

Punitive damages are generally only awarded for exceptionally grossly culpable, willful behavior, not in the case of mere negligence .

There is no comparable legal institution in German and Austrian law .

Examples

  • Monsanto was sentenced to $ 39.2 million in damages and $ 250 million in punitive damages by a San Francisco jury in August 2018. The trigger was a lawsuit brought by Dewayne Johnson, who got cancer from glyphosate . His case was brought forward to a total of around 5,200 other lawsuits because otherwise he would probably not have lived through the end of the process. Monsanto appealed the $ 289 million in aggregate damages.
  • In the Stella Liebeck lawsuit against McDonald's, the plaintiff was awarded US $ 160,000 in compensation for pain and suffering and US $ 480,000 in punitive damages (with an unpublished settlement ultimately determining the amount actually paid out) for scalding herself on coffee that was too hot after McDonald's had previously been awarded Ignored complaints about temperature.
  • American companies spend around 70 billion dollars annually on medical treatment and compensation for damages after work-related accidents due to a breach of traffic safety obligations in the company ( slip and fall ).

literature

  • Dominik Kocholl: Punitive damages in Austria. About damage prevention and private punishment in civil law. Neuer Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2001, ISBN 3-7083-0006-8 .
  • Peter Müller: Punitive Damages and German Damages Law. de Gruyter 2001, ISBN 3-11-016761-1 .
  • Georg Wenglorz, Patrick S. Ryan: The cat in the microwave? Law of the International Economy, Volume 8, pp. 598–610, 2003 (About the American system of punitive damages )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Behr: Punitive damages in German law - resurrection of a repressed phenomenon ZJS 2010, pp. 292-296
  2. ↑ faz.net / ... - Marcus Jung: "For Bayer, Monsanto is a risk worth billions" from August 15, 2018. (Accessed September 23, 2018).
  3. ↑ Paul Powell: What are Typical Slip & Fall Settlement Amounts? Law firm website, accessed on August 5, 2017