A fake Rolex shows why suing in contract or tort changes the payout
Buy an antique Rolex for 100 pounds, discover it is a 50-pound fake, and learn the genuine watch would fetch 500. A contract claim gets you 450 pounds, the value you were promised. Had you overpaid 750, a claim in tort would return all 750. The same wrong can carry very different price tags.
In common law, damages are money a court orders paid to compensate for loss or injury. A claimant must show that a breach of duty caused foreseeable harm to property, body or mind; purely economic loss is rarely enough. Liability rests on the balance of probabilities, and once it is proved some recovery must follow. The harm also has to be proximately caused by the defendant's conduct, so losses nobody could reasonably foresee may go uncompensated, though intentional wrongs like deceit are treated more strictly.
The two main branches aim at different pictures of the world. Tort damages try to put the claimant where they would have been had the wrong never happened. Contract damages usually aim at the position the claimant expected if the promise had been kept, known as the expectation or benefit-of-the-bargain measure. That is why a good bargain favours a contract claim and a bad one favours tort, as the watch example shows. Where expectation cannot be measured, courts may restore the position at signing, the reliance measure, or strip a wrongdoer's unjust gains.
Compensatory awards split into special damages, which cover countable losses such as repair costs and lost earnings, and general damages for pain, suffering and loss of enjoyment of life. A negligent contractor who burns down a factory may owe both the rebuilding costs and the profits lost while it stood closed. British judges set general damages by comparing earlier cases, guided by periodically revised Judicial College tables, and in England and Wales such awards rose 10 percent for judgments after 1 April 2013.
Contracts may fix liquidated damages in advance, but courts refuse to enforce clauses meant only to punish. Awards can also be nominal, contemptuous or exemplary. The idea is old: under Salic law among the Saxons, every person and piece of property had a set value, the weregild, owed to the victim's family or the owner.
Source: Damages
