The Use of Race and Gender to Calculate Damages

The Washington Post ran a story this week about using race and gender to calculate damages.  (See prior coverage here.)  Among others, the story quotes Martha Chamallas and Jenny Wriggins.  Here’s a sample:

The practice of using race and gender to determine personal injury damages, which dates back at least a century, has produced some striking results.

The case of the male fetus and 6-year-old girl came in 1996, after a collision between a postal truck and a car left the car’s passengers – the girl and her godmother, a pregnant 33-year-old ­– dead.

In the case, which took place in a federal court in the Southern District of Georgia, both sides agreed the male fetus’s award to be higher than the girl’s, largely because of the difference in how much they were expected to earn over their lifetime, commonly known as “future lost income.” That’s despite testimony that the girl “exhibited a level of intellectual ability and behavior that surpassed that of most other students” and had a college fund in the works. The fetus’s mother had not completed college and the father was unknown, according to court records.