440
Stevens, J., dissenting
rially from what would be reasonable compensation," ibid., is a substantive rule of decision that federal courts must apply in diversity cases governed by New York law.
I recognize that state rules of appellate procedure do not necessarily bind federal appellate courts. The majority persuasively shows, however, that New York has not merely adopted a new procedure for allocating the decisionmaking function between trial and appellate courts. Ante, at 422- 425. Instead, New York courts have held that all jury awards, not only those reviewed on appeal, must conform to the requirement that they not "deviat[e] materially" from amounts awarded in like cases. Ante, at 425. That New York has chosen to tie its damages ceiling to awards traditionally recovered in similar cases, rather than to a legislatively determined but inflexible monetary sum, is none of our concern.
Given the nature of the state-law command, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit correctly concluded in Consorti v. Armstrong World Industries, Inc., 64 F. 3d 781, superseded, 72 F. 3d 1003 (1995), that New York's excessiveness standard applies in federal court in diversity cases controlled by New York law. Consorti erred in basing that conclusion in part on the fact that a New York statute requires that State's appellate division to apply the standard, but it was nevertheless faithful to the Rules of Decision Act, as construed in Erie R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U. S. 64 (1938), in holding that a state-law limitation on the size of a judgment could not be ignored.1 Similarly, the Court of Appeals
1 Because there is no conceivable conflict between Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 59 and the application of the New York damages limit, this case is controlled by Erie and the Rules of Decision Act, rather than by the Rules Enabling Act's limitation on federal procedural rules that conflict with state substantive rights. See Ely, The Irrepressible Myth of Erie, 87 Harv. L. Rev. 693, 698 (1974); see also Sibbach v. Wilson & Co., 312 U. S. 1 (1941). The Rule does state that new trials may be granted "for any of the reasons for which new trials have heretofore been granted in actions at law in the courts of the United States," but that hardly consti-
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