Recent times have seen renewed academic interest in the law governing the quantification of contractual money awards. This is unsurprising, given the number of disputes arising in this context in ultimate appellate courts across the Commonwealth. The House of Lords alone has been called upon to resolve fundamental questions of principle in this area of the law on at least six separate occasions in the last twenty years. (See Ruxley Electronics & Construction Ltd v Forsyth [1996] AC 344 on “cost of cure” and “loss of amenity” awards; Attorney-General v Blake [2001] 1 AC 268 on the availability of gain-based awards for contractual breach; Alfred McAlpine Construction Ltd v Panatown Ltd [2001] 1 AC 518 on the availability of a “cost of cure” award in the three-party context; Farley v Skinner [2002] 2 AC 732 on the recovery of damages for non-pecuniary loss; The Golden Victory [2007] 2 AC 353 on the appropriate date of assessment and The Achilleas [2009] 1 AC 61 on remoteness of loss).

The High Court of Australia, too, has recently wrestled with difficult questions in this area—first, in Tabcorp Holdings Ltd v Bowen Investments Pty Ltd [2009] HCA 8; 236 CLR 272 (a claim for “cost of cure”) and, more recently, in Clark v Macourt [2013] HCA 56; 88 ALJR 190 (a claim for “breach of warranty”). Similarly, following on from its controversial decision in Semelhago v Paramadevan [1996] 2 SCR 415 on the quantification of damages in lieu of specific performance, the Supreme Court of Canada, in Southcott Estates Inc v Toronto Catholic District School Board [2012] SCC 51, was recently required to consider how principles of mitigation operate in relation to a claim for “damages” brought in the alternative to an unsuccessful suit for specific relief. To these important decisions can be added numerous others in lower courts often concerned with the outworking of general principles in more specific contexts. Recent examples include Rubenstein v HSBC Bank Plc [2012] EWCA Civ 1184 on the scope of recovery for loss consequent on investment misadvice, The Glory Wealth [2013] EWHC 3153 (Comm); [2014] QB 1080; [2013] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 653 on the recovery of prospective loss following the accepted repudiation of a commercial charter, and The New Flamenco [2014] EWHC 1547 (Comm) on the deductibility of post-breach collateral benefits accruing to the claimant—all three of which arose out of the financial crisis following the Lehman Brothers insolvency.

Despite this burgeoning case law, the topic surprisingly remains both under-theorised and (until now) lacking in a systematic doctrinal treatment. Part of the explanation for this no doubt lies in the relatively recent development, at least by the standards of English law, of coherent principles to govern the area, this fact itself being largely attributable to the early common law tendency to leave the quantification of “damages” to juries. Another significant contributing factor is probably the existence of more general treatments of both the law of contract (eg Treitel, Chitty) and the law of damages (eg McGregor) in which the topic of contractual money awards is dealt with simply as an aspect of the book’s broader subject matter. However, whatever the reasons for this gap in the literature, Adam Kramer’s impressive attempt to fill it is long overdue.