Mendez v. County of San Bernardino

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that, in light of the BMW guideposts, “the jury’s award was unconstitutionally excessive in violation of due process and therefore properly remitted by the district court”
• noting that a court’s inherent powers “must be exercised with restraint 5 and discretion”
• mentioning the difficulty of applying the Gore ratio analysis when only nominal damages were awarded
• considering, in a constitutional excessiveness analysis, whether a small award would be “sufficient to deter other [defendants] from engaging in similar conduct in the future”
• finding 23 district courts have broad discretion to reduce the number of hours included in the fee award where the 24 billing records are vague, insufficiently descriptive, or inflated
• upholding an award of $5,000 when the plaintiff received $1 in nominal damages

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).