Punies

The Supreme Court hates punitive damages because of their "unpredictability" for corporate wrongdoers, so it is becoming extremely activist in its attempts to regulate them. But punitive damages are supposed to punish reckless, malicious, and extremely destructive conduct. So the only predictable amount of punitive damages should be zero--an amount that is awarded when you don't recklessly kill people and wildlife by the thousands.

And after all, any of this regulation of damages by judges really violates the 7th Amendment right to a jury trial.

"The seventh amendment must be given a meaning consonant with the political morality that spurred its enactment. The amendment carves out a domain of power for ordinary people, and frustrates efforts by elites to achieve politically cheap changes in the law through the medium of judicial discretion rather than that of explicit statutory or judicial lawmaking. Efforts to transfer discretionary power over punitive damages offend both of these purposes of the seventh amendment." Alan Howard Scheiner, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 142-226.