Reasonable and proportionate  

The Supreme Court has thrown out a $145M punitive damage award against State Farm (link via NathanNewman):

"In sum, courts must ensure that the measure of punishment is both reasonable and proportionate to the amount of harm to the plaintiff," Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the majority.

Certainly compensatory damages should be "proportionate to the amount of harm to the plaintiff," but punitive damages? That seems like a strange stipulation. I don't have any legal background, but from a policy standpoint punitive damages should be sufficiently large to prevent the behavior from continuing. For a company like State Farm, with millions of customers (including the writer, unfortunately), punitive damages should be truly massive.

Clearly I can't speak to the legal specifics of the case, but as a principle it seems to me these awards should be based on the potential for similar cases rather than the the amount of harm done to an individual plaintiff.