This article examines the structure of the law of judicial remedies. It discusses the abstract principles applicable to the taxonomy of remedies and, negatively, the problems and errors to be avoided. The received classifications of remedies are critically reviewed and shown to be seriously defective. Categories such as “specific enforcement”, “perfection”, “coercion” and “declaration” are shown not to belong alongside the goal-based categories of “compensation”, “restitution” and “punishment”. A new taxonomy, based on the relationship between substantive rights and remedies, is proposed.

This article is concerned with taxonomy, that is, classification. Scientists, especially biologists, have no doubt whatever about the necessity of good taxonomy, nor about its intellectual excitement. Colin Tudge, writing of the post-Darwinian living world, says:1

Without classification the variety is simply bewildering, and bewilderment gets in the way of thought. The act of classifying focuses our thoughts and the more we think, the greater the wonder becomes; for this, as Hamlet said in a somewhat different context, is the appetite that grows from what it feeds on. Classification, in short, is not a dull pursuit for obsessives. It is the essential aid to understanding, the means by which to come to grips with life’s variety.

He was referring to the classification of living creatures but his remarks are equally applicable to the metaphysical constructs in which lawyers deal. Bruce Kercher points out that: “The coherence of our study of Remedies does not come from its social, political or legal background…. Our study’s coherence comes from the ways in which we classify these remedies…”2 Unfortunately, our current taxonomies of remedies are defective. This impacts on the coherence of the law of remedies.