Exemplary Damages Practice in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century England

A longer perspective on the modern Anglo-American law of exemplary (or punitive) damages views it as having first begun to emerge after the cases of Huckle v Money and Wilkes v Wood were decided in 1763. This article seeks to further deepen and clarify this perspective. It does so by systematically tracing the evolution of the adjudicative practice according to which English civil juries awarded ‘exemplary damages’ from the period circa 1764 to the early nineteenth century. It shows that this practice scarcely ‘hardened into law’ in the aftermath of the Huckle and Wilkes decisions. In fact, as had been the case long before 1763, for a long time after it, jury determinations as to exemplary damages in common law tort actions remained entirely outside the control of any formal legal doctrine which either of these decisions were taken to have authoritatively recognized.