Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/465

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Cite as: 502 U. S. 301 (1992)

307

Opinion of the Court

also Pacific Mut. Life Ins. Co. v. Haslip, 499 U. S. 1, 15–17 (1991); id., at 25–27 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). Legal dictionaries in existence when the FTCA was drafted and enacted indicate that “punitive damages” were commonly understood to be damages awarded to punish defendants for torts committed with fraud, actual malice, violence, or oppression. See, e. g., Black’s Law Dictionary 501 (3d ed. 1933); The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary 292 (3d ed. 1940). On more than one occasion, this Court has confirmed that general understanding. “By definition, punitive damages are based upon the degree of the defendant’s culpability.” Massachusetts Bonding & Ins. Co. v. United States, 352 U. S. 128, 133 (1956); see also Browning-Ferris Industries of Vt., Inc. v. Kelco Disposal, Inc., 492 U. S. 257, 274, n. 20, 278, n. 24 (1989); Milwaukee & St. Paul R. Co. v. Arms, 91 U. S. 489, 493 (1876); Day v. Woodworth, supra, at 371. The common-law definition of “punitive damages” focuses on the nature of the defendant’s conduct. As a general rule, the common law recognizes that damages intended to compensate the plaintiff are different in kind from “punitive damages.” A cardinal rule of statutory construction holds that: “[W]here Congress borrows terms of art in which are accumulated the legal tradition and meaning of centuries of practice, it presumably knows and adopts the cluster of ideas that were attached to each borrowed word in the body of learning from which it was taken and the meaning its use will convey to the judicial mind unless otherwise instructed. In such case, absence of contrary direction may be taken as satisfaction with widely accepted definitions, not as a departure from them.” Morissette v. United States, 342 U. S. 246, 263 (1952). See also NLRB v. Amax Coal Co., 453 U. S. 322, 329 (1981); Braxton v. United States, 500 U. S. 344, 351, n. (1991). This rule carries particular force in interpreting the FTCA. “Cer-