{"title":"The Restoration Remedy in Private Law","authors":"O. Ben‐Shahar, A. Porat, A. Porat","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3058186","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"One of the most perplexing problems in private law is when and how to compensate victims for emotional harm. This Essay proposes a novel way to accomplish this remedial goal—a restoration measure of damages. It solves the two fundamental problems of compensation for emotional harm—measurement and verification. Instead of measuring the emotional harm and awarding the aggrieved party money damages, this Essay proposes that defendants pay damages directly to restore the underlying interest, the impairment of which led to the emotional harm. And to solve the problem of verification—compensating only those who truly suffered the emotional harm—this Essay develops a sorting mechanism that separates sincere claimants from fakers, awarding the restoration measure of damages to account only for the harm suffered by the former. This Essay further demonstrates how the proposed restoration remedy would apply in important cases and discusses its relevance to additional remedial challenges in private law.","PeriodicalId":51408,"journal":{"name":"Columbia Law Review","volume":"119 1","pages":"1901"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4000,"publicationDate":"2017-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"8","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Columbia Law Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3058186","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"LAW","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 8
Abstract
One of the most perplexing problems in private law is when and how to compensate victims for emotional harm. This Essay proposes a novel way to accomplish this remedial goal—a restoration measure of damages. It solves the two fundamental problems of compensation for emotional harm—measurement and verification. Instead of measuring the emotional harm and awarding the aggrieved party money damages, this Essay proposes that defendants pay damages directly to restore the underlying interest, the impairment of which led to the emotional harm. And to solve the problem of verification—compensating only those who truly suffered the emotional harm—this Essay develops a sorting mechanism that separates sincere claimants from fakers, awarding the restoration measure of damages to account only for the harm suffered by the former. This Essay further demonstrates how the proposed restoration remedy would apply in important cases and discusses its relevance to additional remedial challenges in private law.
期刊介绍:
The Columbia Law Review is one of the world"s leading publications of legal scholarship. Founded in 1901, the Review is an independent nonprofit corporation that produces a law journal edited and published entirely by students at Columbia Law School. It is one of a handful of student-edited law journals in the nation that publish eight issues a year. The Review is the third most widely distributed and cited law review in the country. It receives about 2,000 submissions per year and selects approximately 20-25 manuscripts for publication annually, in addition to student Notes. In 2008, the Review expanded its audience with the launch of Sidebar, an online supplement to the Review.