20 Facts About Nominal damages

At common law, damages are a remedy in the form of a monetary award to be paid to a claimant as compensation for loss or injury.

Liability for payment of an award of Nominal damages is established when the claimant proves, on the balance of probabilities, that a defendant's wrongful act caused a tangible, harm, loss or injury to the plaintiff.

Special Nominal damages can include direct losses and consequential or economic losses resulting from lost profits in a business.

General Nominal damages are monetary compensation for the non-monetary aspects of the specific harm suffered.

General Nominal damages are generally awarded only in claims brought by individuals, when they have suffered personal harm.

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Once accepted there can be no further award for compensation at a later time unless the claim is settled by provisional Nominal damages often found in industrial injury claims such as asbestos related injuries.

Statutory Nominal damages are an amount stipulated within the statute rather than calculated based on the degree of harm to the plaintiff.

Nominal damages are very small damages awarded to show that the loss or harm suffered was technical rather than actual.

Until 2021, in the United States, there was a circuit split as to whether nominal damages may be used if a constitutional violation had occurred but has since been rendered moot.

Contemptuous Nominal damages are a form of damage award available in some jurisdictions.

Generally, punitive Nominal damages, which are termed exemplary Nominal damages in the United Kingdom, are not awarded in order to compensate the plaintiff, but in order to reform or deter the defendant and similar persons from pursuing a course of action such as that which damaged the plaintiff.

Punitive Nominal damages are awarded only in special cases where conduct was egregiously insidious and are over and above the amount of compensatory Nominal damages, such as in the event of malice or intent.

In England and Wales, exemplary damages are limited to the circumstances set out by Lord Devlin in the leading case of Rookes v Barnard.

Punitive Nominal damages awarded in a US case would be difficult to get recognition for in a European court, where punitive Nominal damages are most likely to be considered to violate ordre public.

Aggravated Nominal damages are not often awarded; they apply where the injury has been aggravated by the wrongdoer's behaviour, for example, their cruelty.

In certain areas of the law another head of Nominal damages has long been available, whereby the defendant is made to give up the profits made through the civil wrong in restitution.

Doyle and Wright define restitutionary Nominal damages as being a monetary remedy that is measured according to the defendant's gain rather than the plaintiff's loss.

The plaintiff thereby gains Nominal damages which are not measured by reference to any loss sustained.

In some areas of the law this heading of Nominal damages is uncontroversial; most particularly intellectual property rights and breach of fiduciary relationship.

Basis for restitutionary Nominal damages is much debated, but is usually seen as based on denying a wrongdoer any profit from his wrongdoing.