Special Damages in UK Law

It would be revolting to the ordinary man's sense of justice, and therefore contrary to public policy, that the sufferer should have his damages reduced so that he would gain nothing from the benevolence of his friends or relations or of the public at large, and that the only gainer would be the wrongdoer.

Such actions involve a money award which may put the plaintiff in a purely financial sense in a much stronger position than he was before the wrong. Not merely can he recover the estimated sum of his past and future losses, but, in case the libel, driven underground, emerges from its lurking place at some future date, he must be able to point to a sum awarded by a jury sufficient to convince a bystander of the baselessness of the charge.

As regards the question of damages, I would put it in this way. Special damage in the sense of a monetary loss which the plaintiff has sustained up to the date of trial must be pleaded and particularised. In my view, it is plain law - so plain that there appears to be no direct authority because everyone has accepted it as being the law for the last hundred years - that you can recover in an action only special damage which has been pleaded, and, of course, proved.

The Courts invariably assess the lump sum on the "scale" for figures current at the date of the trial - which is much higher than the figure current at the date of the injury or, at the date of the writ. The plaintiff thus stands to gain by the delay in bringing the case to trial. He ought not to gain still more by having interest from the date of service of the writ.

(1) Save in special cases an undertaking as to damages is the price which the person asking for an interlocutory injunction has to pay for its grant. The Court cannot compel an applicant to give an undertaking but it can refuse to grant an injunction unless he does.

My Lords, given the inescapably artificial and conventional nature of the assessment of damages for non-economic loss in personal injury actions and of treating such assessment as a debt bearing interest from the date of service of the writ, it is an important function of the Court of Appeal to lay down guide-lines both as to the quantum of damages appropriate to compensate for various types of commonly occurring injuries and as to the rates of "interest" from time to time appropriate to be given in respect of non-economic loss and of the various kinds of economic loss.

The crucial question is whether, on the information available to the defendant when the contract was made, he should, or the reasonable man in his position would, have realised that such loss was sufficiently likely to result from the breach of contract to make it proper to hold that the loss flowed naturally from the breach or that loss of that kind should have been within his contemplation.