This appeal requires us, inter alia^, to address an important question as to the circumstances in which an award of punitive damages for a constitutional tort may endure without a corresponding award of compensatory damages.
The underlying litigation had its genesis in the employment of plaintiff-appellee Nora Campos-Orrego (Campos) with the Puerto Rico Comisión para los Asuntos de la Mujer (Women’s Rights Commission or Commission). Campos claims that defendants-appellants Alba Rivera, Olga Birriel Cardona, and Enid Gavilan Perez, her superiors at the Commission, retaliated against her for attempting to assist a victim of sexual harassment. A jury determined that Campos’s claim had merit and awarded her damages. The appellants solicit our intervention, but their lackadaisical approach to appellate advocacy proves once again that “courts — like the Deity— are more prone to help those who help themselves.” Williams v. Drake, 146 F.3d *92 44, 50 (1st Cir.1998). The short of it is that the appellants have squandered most of their assigned errors through defaults of various kinds. Hence, we limit our substantive review to the few remaining grounds (one of which involves the punitive damages issue mentioned above).
In the ordinary case, we would begin by limning the relevant factual background. Here, however, for reasons that will soon become apparent, we submit only a thumbnail sketch, drawn primarily from Campos’s complaint.
Campos worked for the Women’s Rights Commission for several years, principally as a staff attorney. In that capacity, she often counseled victims of gender-based discrimination. One such individual, whom we shall call Client A, met with Campos in 1991 and related a tale of sexual harassment at the hands of the Mayor of Bayamon, a high-level figure in the New Progressive Party (the political party to which the appellants all belong). Campos counseled Client A and explained her legal options, but Client A chose not to pursue her rights at that time.
In August 1994, after a brief interval during which she worked elsewhere, Campos was rehired by the Women’s Rights Commission as a quondam consultant under a one-year contract. In this post, she not only functioned as a staff attorney, but also analyzed sexual harassment in Puerto Rico’s public institutions. In November of 1994, Client A returned to the Commission’s offices and requested a copy of her file. Campos supplied it. Client A proceeded to lodge a sexual harassment complaint against the Mayor on or about June 1,1995.
The media pounced on Client A’s story like a pride of hungry lions on a side of beef. Extensive coverage began as early as June 2. The three appellants summoned Campos to a meeting that very day and interrogated her as to why she had given Client A a copy of the file. According to Campos, the appellants intimated that the matter should have been treated with greater discretion because it involved the Mayor. On June 3, two of the appellants discussed the incident on a popular radio show and implied that an unnamed employee (who could not have been anyone but Campos) was incompetent, or insubordinate, or both. By letter dated June 6, Rivera (the Commission’s executive director) terminated Campos’s employment effective June 30 — and did so notwithstanding that, roughly a week before the story broke, Campos had accepted Rivera’s offer to renew her contract for another year, commencing July 1, 1995. The next day, El Día, a major Spanish-language newspaper, published an article in which Rivera attributed the Commission’s lack of action on Client A’s complaint to Campos. The newspaper also reported that Campos would be terminated. Campos claims that the appellants posted the story in public view in the Commission’s offices.
Campos brought suit against the three appellants in Puerto Rico’s federal district court, 1 claiming that they had cashiered her because she appropriately aided Client A, rather than discouraging or attempting to derail Client A’s embryonic sexual harassment complaint against a political heavyweight. Campos argued that her termination violated P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 155h (1995) (Law 17), which safeguards individuals against retaliation for affording assistance to persons who seek to mount sexual harassment claims. She likewise argued that the manner in which Rivera fired her abridged her right to procedural due process. 2
*93 The appellants denied Campos’s allegations and the matter was tried to a jury over a period of 12 days. The docket indicates that, at the close of Campos’s case in chief and again at the close of all the evidence, the appellants moved for judgment as a matter of law. See Fed. R.Civ.P. 50. In respect to the two causes of action with which we are concerned, they claim to have asserted that Campos lacked standing to charge retaliation under Law 17 and that she had no property interest sufficient to support her procedural due process claim. In any event, the district court denied the appellants’ motions on both occasions. Insofar as is material here, the jury returned a general verdict in Campos’s favor, awarding her $80,000 in compensatory damages against the appellants, jointly and severally, on the Law 17 count and $10,000 in punitive damages against Rivera on the due process count.
Campos promptly moved for the entry of a judgment embodying the jury’s award but augmenting it by (1) doubling the compensatory damages on the Law 17 claim, 3 (2) ordering reinstatement, and (3) deducting $1 from the punitive damage award and reallocating it as nominal damages on the due process claim (or, in the alternative, merely reaffirming the punitive damage award). The appellants opposed this motion. They contended that Campos was not entitled to statutory doubling because the jury had not been instructed on this potentiality, that reinstatement should be denied (or, at least, not ordered without an evidentiary hearing), and that the punitive damage award should be vacated due to the lack of any supporting compensatory damages. In respect to the Law 17 claim, the district court doubled the compensatory damages (to $160,000), eschewed an evi-dentiary hearing, and ordered Campos’s reinstatement. In respect to the due process claim, the court recast $1 from the punitive damage award as nominal damages, thus keeping the aggregate amount intact but reducing punitives to $9,999. The appellants then renewed their motion for judgment as a matter of law, but to no avail. This appeal followed.
It is the nature of the adjudicative process that appellate courts apply discerned principles of law to facts established in a trial court or an administrative tribunal. Parties seeking appellate review must furnish the court with the raw materials necessary to the due performance of the appellate task.
See Moore v. Murphy,
Should an appellant spurn this duty and drape an incomplete record around the court’s neck, the court in its discretion either may scrutinize the merits of the case insofar as the record permits, or may dismiss the appeal if the absence of *94 a full transcript thwarts intelligent review.
Moore,
These principles pertain here. The appellants, who now strive to advance a myriad of factbound arguments, chose to proceed in this forum armed only with a transcript of the district judge’s charge to the jury. They did not secure a transcript of any other portion(s) of the protracted proceedings below. This omission disables us from affording reasoned consideration to most of the issues that the appellants seek to raise. We offer two illustrations of why these arguments are forfeit.
The most obvious example pertains to the appellants’ suffieieney-of-the-evidence argument. They calumnize the district court’s denial of their motions for judgment as a matter of law on the basis that “[tjhere was absolutely no evidence to support a claim under Law 17 that [their] conduct was gender-based.” Appellants’ Brief at 10. In essence, their argument is that Campos was fired for her lack of loyalty to her superiors, not because of her gender or for facilitating the filing of a sexual harassment claim against a political icon. Appellate judges are not mind readers, and it is impossible for us to evaluate this contention without recourse to an accurate record of the evidence presented at trial. By failing to furnish a trial transcript, the appellants defaulted the point. 4
Another example of how the appellants’ failure to furnish a transcript negatively impacts the instant appeal relates to Rivera’s challenge to the jury’s determination that she was liable for a due process violation. For Campos’s job to be protected by the procedural safeguards of the Due Process Clause, she must have had “a legitimate claim of entitlement to it.”
Board of Regents v. Roth,
We think that these two examples suffice, and that no useful purpose would be served by itemizing the other components of the appellants’ asseverational array that have been rendered nugatory by their failure to furnish a suitable record. Withal, the appellants do assert some claims of error that might be susceptible to consideration without recourse to a transcript, and it is to those claims that we now turn.
*95 The first such claim poses an intriguing question: Whether Law 17’s protection against retaliatory action by an employer due to an employee’s participation in the lodging or investigation of a sexual harassment complaint extends to retaliation by an employer other than the harassment victim’s employer? On one hand, Law 17’s reference to an “employer” conceivably could be limited to a common employer of both the victim of the harassment and the victim of the retaliation—in which event Campos (who did not work for the Mayor or for the municipality) would have no cause of action. 5 On the other hand, the inexplicit statutory language, coupled with the remedial spirit animating Law 17, might well support an interpretation that would allow an action against any employer engaging in such retaliatory acts, whether or not that employer also had employed the harassment victim. Insofar as we can tell, the Puerto Rico courts have not resolved this conundrum.
Regardless of the interesting nature of the question, we must refrain from answering it. This issue has been forfeited because the appellants failed to raise it squarely in the trial court. (At least, this is how it appears from the incomplete record available to us.) We have reiterated, with a regularity bordering on the echolalic, that a party’s failure to advance an issue in the
nisi prius
court ordinarily bars consideration of that issue on appellate review.
See, e.g., LaChapelle v. Berkshire Life Ins. Co.,
A second issue falls by the wayside for much the same reason. The appellants contend on appeal that the only proper defendant in a retaliation case under Law 17 is the plaintiffs actual employer (here, the Commission), not individual managers. But, no written motion in the record advances this theory of defense, and Campos denies that the appellants argued the point below. Since the appellants neglected to produce a transcript, we must treat this argument, too, as by the boards. Hence, we will not address it, except to say that plain-error review is not in order, for the error—if there is one—is not obvious, and no patent injustice appears in holding the appellants to the readily foreseeable consequences of their own trial tactics.
These multiple defaults do not entirely close the door on this appeal, but they narrow the aperture considerably. In the last analysis, they leave two preserved assignments of error susceptible to meaningful review on the meager record furnished to us.
The first contests the trial judge’s authority to double the jury’s compensatory damage award without having instructed the jury that such doubling would occur. In the appellants’ view, this course of action usurped the jury’s responsibility for determining damages and thereby violated the Seventh Amendment.
*96
This contention presents a pure question of law, and, accordingly, our review is plenary.
See In re Cusumano,
It is common ground that judges must respect the boundaries of a jury’s province, and that judicial trespass may violate a litigant’s Seventh Amendment rights.
See Dimick v. Schiedt,
This case aptly illustrates the dichotomy. Law 17 decrees that violators “incur civil liability ... for a sum equal to double the amount of the damages that the action has caused the employee or job applicant....” P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 155j. When a jury trial has been demanded and the case is tried in a federal court, such a scheme charges the jury with calculating the amount of damages sustained by the victim as a matter of fact.
See Pollock & Riley, Inc. v. Pearl Brewing Co.,
The appellants further assert that, at the very least, the judge should have told the jury that Law 17 provided for the subsequent doubling of any compensatory damage award. This assertion is fatally flawed. For one thing, the scant record that the appellants have supplied does not indicate that they either requested such an instruction or objected in a timeous fashion to its omission. They have, therefore, forfeited the right to complain.
See Elliott v. S.D. Warren Co.,
For another thing, in situations in which multiple damage awards are statutorily provided, “it is generally not advisable to inform a jury of the [multiple damage] provisions ... because of the danger that a jury may reduce a plaintiffs award to account for [the multiplication].”
CVD, Inc. v. Raytheon Co.,
The appellants’ second preserved point concerns the district court’s modification of the damage award on the due process claim. The affected appellant, Rivera, argues that a verdict for compensatory damages is a sine qua non to a verdict for punitive damages; that the lower court therefore should have vacated the punitive damage award on the due process count; and that, by shifting $1 from punitive damages to nominal damages and leaving the remainder of the punitive award in place, the court exceeded its authority. Rivera’s challenge implicates both the sufficiency *97 vel non of stand-alone punitive damage awards and the power of the district court to award nominal damages for a constitutional violation. Thus, her challenge presents questions of law, subject to plenary review.
Rivera’s argument proceeds from two propositions with which we are in general agreement. First, the Seventh Amendment flatly prohibits federal courts from augmenting jury verdicts by additur.
See Dimick,
Though couched in terms of familiar principles, Rivera’s objection actually rests on a fundamental misapprehension. While it is true that in a typical state-law tort case punitive damages unaccompanied by either compensatory or nominal damages cannot stand,
see, e.g., Cooper Distrib. Co. v. Amana Refrig’n, Inc.,
[I]f it be once conceded that [punitive] damages may be assessed against the wrongdoer, and, when assessed, may be taken by the plaintiff,—and such is the settled law of the federal courts,—there is neither sense nor reason in the proposition that such additional damages may be recovered by a plaintiff who is able to show that he has lost $10, and may not be recovered by some other plaintiff who has sustained, it may be, far greater injury, but is unable to prove that he is poorer in the pocket by the wrongdoing of defendant.
Basista v. Weir,
Here, however, there is a rub. The district court specifically instructed the jury that punitive damages “may be allowed only if you should first award the plaintiff Campos a verdict for actual or compensatory damages on the [procedural due process] cause of action.” Neither party objected to this instruction, and, thus, it became the law of the case.
See Milone v. Moceri Family, Inc.,
In this instance, we need not decide whether Campos has lost the benefit of favorable legal authority by failing to object to the judge’s charge. This is so because, even if the law of thé case took hold, the jury’s verdict on the due process
*98
count would not have been void, but only internally inconsistent — and, thus, repairable. Parties confronted by an internally inconsistent jury verdict have an obligation to call the inconsistency to the trial judge’s attention.
See, e.g., Toucet v. Maritime Overseas Corp.,
From that point forward, the pieces fall easily into place. The district court gave Campos $1 in nominal damages at a later date, subtracting that sum from the $10,-000 punitive damage award. One can hardly quarrel with this improvisation. Over two decades ago, the Supreme Court held that nominal damages are recoverable on a finding of a procedural due process violation, even without a corollary finding of injury or an award of compensatory damages.
See Carey v. Piphus,
[bjecause the right to procedural due process is “absolute” in the sense that it does not depend upon the merits of a claimant’s substantive assertions, and because of the importance to organized society that procedural due process be observed, we believe that the denial of procedural due process should be actionable for nominal damages without proof of actual injury.
Id.
at 266,
Extrapolating from
Carey,
other courts of appeals have held that when a jury finds a violation of an “absolute” constitutional right yet declines to award compensatory damages, the district court ordinarily should award nominal damages.
See, e.g., Cabrera v. Jakabovitz,
Let us be perfectly clear. We do not suggest that this entitlement is automatic, but, rather, it is incumbent upon the plaintiff to make a timely request for nominal damages.
Cf. Kerr-Selgas,
In some circuits, a plaintiff must request nominal damages ex ante, that is, by seeking a jury instruction to that effect,
*99
on penalty of waiver.
See, e.g., Cooper,
That ends the matter. The award of nominal damages bridges any gap attributable to the absence of a compensatory damage award. See id. at 1214. Rivera’s objection to the judgment is, therefore, bootless.
IV. CONCLUSION
We need go no further. On this exiguous, waiver-riddled record, only a smattering of issues are amenable to review. Limiting our substantive consideration to those few issues, we discern no reversible error. Accordingly, the judgment below will be
Affirmed. Costs to appellee.
Notes
. Since Campos’s complaint contained some federal claims, brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the district court had original jurisdiction. See 28 U.S.C. § 1331. The court had supplemental jurisdiction over Campos's claims under Puerto Rico law, as those claims arose out of a common nucleus of operative fact. See id. § 1367(a), (e).
. Campos's complaint also contained general tort claims, a defamation claim, and a claim that the appellants had violated her First *93 Amendment rights. Inasmuch as these claims are not at issue in this appeal, we make no further mention of them.
. This request stemmed from Law 17 itself, which provides in pertinent part:
Any person responsible for sexual harassment in employment as defined by [Law 17] shall incur civil liability: (1) for a sum equal to double the amount of the damages that the action has caused the employee or job applicant; or (2) for a sum of not less than three thousand (3,000) dollars at the discretion of the court, in those cases in which pecuniary damages cannot be determined. In the judgment in civil actions under the above provisions, the court shall order the employer to hire, promote or reinstate the employee in his job and to cease and desist of the act in question.
P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 155j (1995).
. The lack of a transcript frustrates appellate review of the denial of a motion for judgment as a matter of law in another way as well. In such a situation, an appellant bears the burden of showing that the ground asserted on appeal was raised in her Rule 50 motion below.
See, e.g., Correa v. Hospital San Francisco,
. The statute itself provides, somewhat cryptically:
An employer shall be held liable pursuant to the provisions of [Law 17] when he carries out any action that results in adversely affecting the opportunities, terms and working conditions of any person who has rejected the employer's practices that are in conflict with the provisions of [Law 17] or who has filed a complaint or suit, given testimony, collaborated or participated in any other manner in an investigation, procedure or hearing that is initiated under [Law 17].
P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 155h (1995).
. Our decision in
Kerr-Selgas
does not conflict with this rule. That case involved a
statutory
claim, brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1981a, rather than a constitutional violation.
See Kerr-Selgas,
. The briefs and the fragments of the record available to us are tenebrous as to whether the jury was still in the jury box when Campos made her request. Given the lack of a transcript and the appellants’ responsibility for that void, we assume, favorably to Campos, that such was the case.
. We take no view of whether the district court could have awarded nominal damages in addition to the punitive damage award rather than subtracting the former from the latter. Suffice to say that Campos — the only party harmed by the subtraction — has not complained of it.