1 What It Means
A court order reducing a jury's damages award to a smaller amount, which the plaintiff must accept or else face an entirely new trial.
2 Caught in the Wild
The trial court granted a remittitur, reducing the award from four million dollars to one million, and gave the plaintiff ten days to accept it or go back to trial.
Illustrative usage · Undated
3 Where It Comes From
The word comes from the Latin remittere, to send back, the same root that gives English remit and remission. It entered American legal practice in the early 1800s as judges needed a precise term for sending an excessive verdict back down rather than throwing it out entirely. It never spread beyond courtrooms because the concept it names, a judge adjusting a jury's math without a new trial, only exists within civil procedure. No layperson ever needs to describe it, so the word stayed locked inside the profession that coined it, surviving mostly in appellate opinions and law school casebooks.
4 The World Behind the Word
Civil juries award damages, and sometimes they award too much, a number untethered from the evidence presented. Rather than force both sides back through a costly trial, judges developed a middle path. A judge can tell the plaintiff: accept this lower figure, or we try the case again from scratch. The plaintiff almost always takes the reduced sum. The flip side, additur, raises an inadequate award, though federal courts have ruled it unconstitutional under the Seventh Amendment's jury guarantee, while remittitur survives because reducing a verdict does not require reconstituting facts a jury never found. It is one of the few places where a judge gets to quietly edit a jury's conclusion.
5 Use It Yourself
This one mostly stays in the courtroom, but it is a sharp word for any negotiation where someone proposes a smaller number than you asked for, take it or start over. Use it dropping into a conversation about a settlement, a contractor's revised estimate, or a freelance invoice getting haggled down, and watch a lawyer friend light up that you know it.
Try it out loud
The judge ordered a remittitur, cutting the jury's award nearly in half.
🗝️The Deep Cut File
Remittitur has a quieter cousin most people have actually said without noticing the connection: remit, as in paying a bill, or remission, as in a disease going quiet. All three descend from the same Latin verb, remittere, to send back or release. A cancer in remission and a jury verdict under remittitur are linguistically the same move, something excessive being sent back down to a manageable size. The legal and medical worlds borrowed the identical Latin root for opposite emotional registers, one a relief, one a technical correction, and neither field ever noticed they were speaking the same word.
