Tort law requires those who are found to be at fault for harming others to compensate the victims. Typical harms include the loss of past or future income, payment of medical expenses, and payment for pain and suffering. There may also be additionalpunitive damagesthat are meant to punish the...
At best it is possible to calculate damage on the basis of many presumptions at the abstract level of parts of the population, but damage appears practically incalculable at the level of individual plaintiffs. The calculation of the intergenerational effects in particular seems to be a far cry....
How Courts Calculate the Value of Human Life Jury awards always vary widely, and often seem arbitrary. Despite this outward appearance of unpredictability, courts try to apply a fairly certain set of guidelines to establish the value of a lost life. The basis of those guidelines fall into two ...