"The 4-year-old’s case is a rare public look at one corner of the American legal system that explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.
As a result, white and male victims often receive larger awards than people of color and women in similar cases, according to more than two dozen lawyers and forensic economists, the experts who make the calculations. These differences largely derive from projections of how much more money individuals would have earned over their lifetimes had they not been injured – projections that take into account average earnings and employment levels by race and gender...
Law professors who study the practice in the United States say it deserves a fresh look, given America’s increasing awareness of the role race plays in the justice system – as well as the progress women have made in closing other economic disparities. Some other countries, including Canada and Israel, have moved away from using the averages in the name of equality. And the United States has banned the use of race and gender averages in some other calculations. The Affordable Care Act, for example, outlawed the practice of charging women more for health insurance than men...
Still, even some economists acknowledge the practice has problems. For example, most economists don’t attempt to account for how the earnings and employment gaps between men and women will change over time. “If I had used [averages] for females back in 1970, I probably would have underestimated their incomes substantially,” said Bill Brandt, a forensic economist in Washington state...
none of the discussion in court directly addressed G.M.M.’s demographics, according to court records. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Although the judge banned discussion of the boy’s ethnicity in the court, the jury still had access only to calculations of damages that included ethnicity as a component."
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