Limitations on the availability of damages对损.doc

Limitations on damages 高橋宏司 Causation Remoteness of loss Hadley v. Baxendale (1854) 9 Exch 341 The owner of a flour mill asked a carrier to deliver a broken shaft to a manufacturer as a pattern by which to make a new shaft. The carrier was negligent in delivery and as a result, the mill owner did not receive a new shaft for some days after the time they ought to have received it. In the meantime, they were unable to work their mill and incurred a loss of profits. The owner claimed damages from the carrier for the loss of profits. Held that under the circumstances, such loss could not be recovered. “Where two parties have made a contract which one of them has broken, the damages which the other party ought to receive in respect of such breach of contract should be such as may fairly and reasonably be considered either arising naturally, ie, according to the usual course of things, from such breach of contract itself, or such as may reasonably be supposed to have been in the contemplation of both parties, at the time they made the contract, as the probable result of the breach of it. … For, had the special circumstances been known, the parties might have specially provided for the breach of contract by special terms as to the damages in that case … Now, in the present case, if we are to apply the principles above laid down, we find that the only circumstances here communicated by the plaintiffs to the defendants at the time the contract was made, were, that the article to be carried was the broken shaft of a mill, and that the plaintiffs were the millers of that mill. But how do these circumstances shew reasonably that the profits of the mill must be stopped by an unreasonable delay in the delivery of the broken shaft by the carrier to the third person? … such loss would neither have flowed naturally from the breach of this contract in the great multitude of such cases occurring under ordinary circumstances, nor were the special circumstances … communicated to or kno