Vernon Valentine Palmer (ed), The Recovery of Non-Pecuniary Loss in European Contract Law
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0397 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Pages | 128-129 |
In this, the fourteenth book published in the series The Common Core of European Private Law (published as part of the Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law), the focus of attention is the thorny issue of the recovery of non-pecuniary loss in the contract law regimes of 12 European jurisdictions, namely Austria, Bulgaria, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, and Sweden. Previous contract law projects in the Common Core series have included “unexpected circumstances in European contract law”, “precontractual liability in European private law”, “mistake, fraud and duties to inform in European contract law”, “the enforceability of promises in European contract law’ and ‘good faith in European contract law”. This volume is a welcome and worthy addition to the series.
The initial chapters in Part 1 of the book are essentially introductory in nature, setting the scene for the hypothetical scenarios and country responses to come in Part 2. Part 1 of the book is composed of four chapters written by Nils Jansen and Vernon Palmer, which are largely taken up with a detailed examination of the various sources of the traditional hostility of contract law regimes to the recovery of this kind of loss. The preoccupation with the restriction of recovery to financial losses is particularly notable in the writings of both Civilian and Common Law systems, with French, Belgian, and Romano-Dutch jurists as well as the English judiciary equally dismissive of the notion that liability should extend to non-financial or moral damage. In these chapters, Nils Jansen and Vernon Palmer move on to identify and discuss the areas of contract law where the vice-like grip on recovery for non-pecuniary losses was gradually loosened in European legal systems. For example, in contracts such as the contract for the promise of marriage, the psychological effect of a breach was deemed to be sufficiently egregious to warrant recovery. However, whether the loss recoverable was to be assessed as the spurned female's patrimonial loss or reparation for the mental suffering sustained, varied across jurisdictions.
Part 2 of the book turns to consider the detail of the law governing the recovery of damages for non-patrimonial loss in the twelve selected European legal systems. This is undertaken in the time-honoured fashion of the Common Core of European Private law methodology, i.e. a number of hypothetical scenarios are put forward for...
To continue reading
Request your trial