Establishing a Good-faith Defense to Punitive-damage Claims PDF Download

Author: John W. Martin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
affirmative defense against punitive damage claims based on reckless conduct of employees, when that conduct is contrary to a firm's good-faith efforts to employ well-designed safety policies and procedures. This article further argues that the so-called "government standards" defense against punitive damages should be defined in a way that both promotes compliance with government standards and helps to assure that the standards provide adequate public safety. This goal could be accomplished by providing that compliance with an applicable federal safety standard constitutes prima facie evidence of good faith and shifts the burden of proof to the plaintiff to show, by clear and convincing evidence that either (1) the defendant was guilty of fraud on a regulatory agency; (2) clear advances in the state of the art, implemented after the standard had been adopted but before the defendant's product was designed, had rendered the product obsolete; or (3) the standard itself reflects a flagrant indifference to sa.