Second-best alternative

The New York Times is at its best in its story to day about the Vioxx verdict in Texas ($253 million jury award for a man in his late 50's who died who had taken the drug). As the Times writes, the damages were $25 million, the punitive damages were $225 million, and Texas law will reduce punitive damages to $1.5 million (I am rounding freely these numbers).

Powerline objects to this as a bad jury verdict and suggests it does much to undermine the jury system.

Perhaps, but the cure here is partly already enacted: Texas has already reduced the damages amount.

Juries are more important and, I strongly suspect, as reliable as judges would be. (Note, that leaves them a great deal of room to be imperfect). What we really need is to fully accept these sorts of verdicts, get rid of statutes that arbitrarily reduce punitive damages, and then massively tighten the judicial control over punitive damages. They should be massive when merited -- that's the very point of "punitive" -- but they should be imposed far less often than they seem to be. Unless something major is going on that hasn't been reported, this just isn't a punitive damages case. But the way to cure that is to have responsible trial judges administer the jury instructions and claims in the case, and to have responsible trial and appellate judges review the jury verdict when it's over. (And was this guy really worth $25 million in damages? That's quite a chunk itself.)