Cite as: 517 U. S. 559 (1996)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
10%,1 the financial position of the defendant, and the costs of litigation. Id., at 625-626. These standards, we previously held, "impos[e] a sufficiently definite and meaningful constraint on the discretion of Alabama factfinders in awarding punitive damages." Haslip, 499 U. S., at 22; see also TXO, 509 U. S., at 462, n. 28. Alabama's highest court could have displayed its labor pains more visibly,2 but its judgment is nonetheless entitled to a presumption of legitimacy. See Rowan v. Runnels, 5 How. 134, 139 (1847) ("[T]his court will always feel itself bound to respect the decisions of the State courts, and from the time they are made will regard them as conclusive in all cases upon the construction of their own constitution and laws.").
We accept, of course, that Alabama's Supreme Court applied the State's own law correctly. Under that law, the State's objectives—"punishment and deterrence"—guide punitive damages awards. See Birmingham v. Benson, 631 So. 2d 902, 904 (Ala. 1994). Nor should we be quick to find a constitutional infirmity when the highest state court endeavored a corrective for one counsel's slip and the other's oversight—counsel for plaintiff's excess in summation, unobjected to by counsel for defendant, see supra, at 609—and when the state court did so intending to follow the process approved in our Haslip and TXO decisions.
B
The Court finds Alabama's $2 million award not simply excessive, but grossly so, and therefore unconstitutional.
1 According to trial testimony, in late May 1992, BMW began redirecting refinished cars out of Alabama and two other States. Tr. 964. The jury returned its verdict in favor of Gore on June 12, 1992. Five days later, BMW changed its national policy to one of full disclosure. Id., at 1026.
2 See, e. g., Brief for Law and Economics Scholars et al. as Amici Curiae 6-28 (economic analysis demonstrates that Alabama Supreme Court's judgment was not unreasonable); W. Landes & R. Posner, Economic Structure of Tort Law 160-163 (1987) (economic model for assessing propriety of punitive damages in certain tort cases).
611
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