BMW v. Gore is a great tort case in the tradition of old chestnuts such as Palsgraf and Vincent. A multimillion dollar jury verdict for a literally harmless scratch provided BMW with a powerful argument for reversal. If the facts were strong for BMW, however, the law was very weak. As the dissenters pointed out, there is no textual home, fundamental right, clear precedent, or argument from institutional structure to justify the United States Supreme Court in reaching out to find a constitutional violation, and without such a finding, there is arguably no basis whatsoever for reviewing the jury verdict. But Gore is a hard case beyond the apparently dramatic clash between its facts and its law. It is hard because our current understanding of tort concepts is too crude to permit close scrutiny of a basic argument for the non-reviewability of punitive damages awards. That argument is that, as purely private law among private parties, punitive damages are effectively insulated from review under procedural due process analysis. Gore forces us to ask what it means for punitive damages to be a matter of "private" law; whether they remain private today; and why, if at all, the private/public distinction should matter to punitive damages law. Drawing upon the model of "rights, wrongs, and recourse" of tort law that this author has developed in prior articles, the account explains the historically accepted role of punitive damages within private law, while vindicating the Supreme Court's holding in Gore that today's punitive damages law should sometimes trigger constitutional scrutiny.