The articles in this special issue are the product of a conference on the future of punitive damages held at the University of Wisconsin Law School in October 1996.' The conference, sponsored by the Consumer Law Program and the Disputes Processing Research Program (both conq)onents of the Law School's Institute for Legal Studies) and the Tort and Insurance Practice Section of the American Bar Association, was designed to gather and critically examine what we know about punitive damages and to assess the relevance of that knowledge to policy debate about the civil justice system.'' In this Introduction, I briefly note the several additions to our picture of punitive damage activity, the difficulties of extending that picture to include die frequently invoked but seldom explored "shadow" of punitive damages, and the way that the research reported here and the conference itself illuminate the state of the discourse about punitive damages and civil justice generally.
