Harrisburg, PA
The Legal Intelligencer
(by Casey Alan Coyle)
The music genre hip-hop recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. According to PBS, “no song announced hip-hop’s entrance into the mainstream louder” than the 1997 single “Mo Money Mo Problems” by Brooklyn-born Rapper Christopher Wallace, better known by his stage names “Notorious B.I.G.” and “Biggie.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/songs-of-the-summer-1997/. Built on a sample of Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” the track featured the chorus: “I don’t know what, they want from me/ It’s like the more money we come across/ The more problems we see.” Now, nearly three decades later, that hook captures an emerging trend in the law.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause “prohibits the imposition of grossly excessive or arbitrary punishments on a tortfeasor.” State Farm Mut. Auto Ins. Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S. 408, 416 (2003). While this concern precipitated the creation of a framework to assess the constitutionality of punitive damages awards over 30 years ago, no such rubric exists to determine whether compensatory damages awards comport with due process. Pennsylvania litigants are therefore left to challenge excessive compensatory damages awards under the common law. But as noneconomic damages awards continue to grow, so do concerns over their constitutionality, especially where they dwarf the economic damages, if any, awarded. This begs the question: when it comes to noneconomic damages, is it a case of mo money, mo problems?
Compensatory v. Punitive Damages
Compensatory and punitive damages, though typically awarded at the same trial, serve distinct purposes. Compensatory damages compensate for proven injury or loss. They aim to redress the concrete loss that the plaintiff suffered because of the defendant’s conduct and include both economic harm (such as lost wages or out-of-pocket expenses) and noneconomic harm (like mental anguish, pain and suffering, and embarrassment and humiliation). …