Now in its Second edition this essential title on the Law of Damages provides a comprehensive and authoritative account of the legal principles to be applied in assessing damages. It examines the current law and also highlights areas for possible future development. The text covers all the key areas and general principles of damages making it an essential text for both practitioners and academics.

Written by leading academics and QCs, this essential text on the Law of Damages provides a comprehensive and authoritative account of the legal principles to be applied in assessing damages. It examines the current law and highlights areas for possible future development. Commentary has been extensively updated to include:

* Two new chapters: Contracts for the Benefit of Third Parties and Penalties and Liquidated Damages
* A detailed and incisive consideration of the post-April 2005 periodic payment regime and particular consideration of the decision of the Court of Appeal in Thompstone v. Tameside
* A Practitioner's insight into the complexity of the deduction of state benefits in high value claims with particular reference to the decision in Crofton v. National Health Service Litigation Authority
* A helpful guide for practitioners to the assessment of general damages utilising the JSB Guidelines, Eighth edition
* A comprehensive review of all the up-to-date authorities on assessment of damages, both special and future loss, in personal injury claims

The book is part of the Common Law menu which is supported by annual updates.

SOURCE CURRENCY
Second Edition, May 2010

Preface
As we said when introducing the first edition of this work some seven years ago, damages is big legal business. This is the case not only for lawyers themselves but, more importantly, for their clients, to most of whom the size of the eventual cheque is of infinitely more importance than any abstract principle of liability in contract or tort. But the law is also, like most of the rest of the law, increasingly fluid and fast-changing. Personal injury damages is rapidly becoming a separate subject in its own right, with its own quirks and technicalities: a fact that amply vindicates our original decision to devote a completely separate section of this book to it. Elsewhere in the law, old certainties are increasingly undermined, and old approaches discredited. The net loss principle and the exceptions to it, for example, continue to defy accurate taxonomy. The fault-lines lying behind remoteness of loss, long thought dormant, have moved again, courtesy of the House of Lords' decision in The Achilleas. The law of penalty clauses, if not yet dead, now has a distinctly pallid look about it. For that matter, even the definition of what counts as a loss, and the awkward question of how far a claimant can elect to base a claim on the defendant's gain from wrongdoing, remains a potential quicksand.
As ever, our approach is (as intended) largely conventional and Anglocentric. But we are very aware that English common law is not alone in the world, and indeed is being challenged ever more insistently not so much by Anglophone disagreement but by civilian-inspired interlopers such as the Principles of European Contract Law. Accordingly we have had no hesitation in keeping one eye on events across the oceans in the Commonwealth and the US, not to mention those on the other side of the (nominally narrower) English Channel.

We must both express our heartfelt gratitude to Butterworths' editorial staff, without whom this edition and indeed book would not have happened. Their patience, tact and sheer hard work has ensured not only that this edition appeared, but that it did so shipshape and (roughly) on time.
The law is stated as at March 2010, though some later updating has on occasion been possible.
May 2010