"The accident had clearly stripped Johnson of substantial happiness, and he demanded compensation for that loss—"hedonic damages," in legal parlance. Other noneconomic tort awards, like money doled out for emotional distress, are arbitrary, based on little more than the jury's intuition and the size of past sums. There's no such thing as an expert witness on pain and suffering, since it's acknowledged that there's no way to calculate something so subjective. Hedonic damages, by contrast, are ostensibly rooted in science, based on a statistical formula that purports to translate a lifetime of joie de vivre into cold cash. That means the plaintiff can put an expert witness on the stand to explain the principles of hedonic damages and moisten a few jurors' eyes. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible because of doubts that forensic economists can compute joy. But when the testimony works, it can inspire jurors to dole out millions."
"The jury in the Johnson case seemed swayed by that logic. It awarded $3.5 million to Johnson and his wife, far more than they would have recovered had they pressed only for economic damages of lost wages and medical costs. How the jury arrived at that multimillion-dollar figure is a mystery to Smith, as he did not suggest an exact sum—and never does. "I orient them to the concept and give them the statistical values, then leave the final tailoring up to them," he said."
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http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=505
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