The Recovery of Damages for Non-Pecuniary Loss in the United Kingdom: A Critique and Proposal for a New Structure Integrating Recovery in Contract and Tort

This paper seeks to give an integrated and critical account of the availability of damages for non-pecuniary loss in England and Wales across contract and tort. In the past the availability of such damages in the law of obligations has been addressed in the context of separate discussions of available remedies for either breach of contract or the commission of a tort. The proposal in this paper is structured around a variation of a six fold classification which has received recent endorsement by the English Court of Appeal in the important and remarkable, but mostly unnoticed, case of Simmons v Castle (2012).