THE WEDDING DRESS

The Wedding Dress

Memo

The Wedding Dress

Maria Manning vs. Sally Singer - Tuscon Arizona

At first sight it sounds odd to suggest that there is (or even should be) any difference, apart from the name, between Sally Singer and Maria Manning direct the modern tendency is to think of a party breaching a contract as being liable for the foreseeable loss resulting from his breach, no more and no less, without singling out any particular sort of loss for special treatment. Whatever contingent differences there may be, if a plaintiff can show that she is foreseeably less well-off than she would have been had the defendant not breached, that is it. It is beside the point to go on and ask whether the impoverishment happened directly, at one step removed, or at four.19 Life, however, is more untidy than that. In practice, as will appear, it may well make a difference whether the harm the plaintiff. We may as well start with remoteness under the principle in Hadley v. Baxendale 1927 or any analogous foreseeability rule that applies. Admittedly, at first sight the difference between direct and consequential losses in this connection is not obvious. Insofar as there is such a difference (the argument runs), this can surely be explained on the basis that consequential losses are ex hypothesi less foreseeable than direct ones or by applying some analogous reasoning. But the suggestion here is that this is not the whole story. We can, it is submitted, go further and say that to all intents and purposes, the remoteness rule is limited to consequential losses and does not apply at all to direct losses. In particular, out of the thousands of cases where plaintiffs have found their damages limited by references to a doctrine of foreseeability, it is noteworthy that virtually all have involved claims for consequential losses in some What Is a Loss? For example, Browning v. Fies 1917 it could be said that direct measures such as the standard “value less price” figures in sale of goods cases count, by definition, as foreseeable. Thus, such direct measures count as damages arising naturally, i.e., according to the usual course of things, from such breach of contract, id. at 151, or damages following from the breach “in the ordinary course of events.” The nature of the damages, rather than the label attached to them, makes incidental damages more easily recoverable”). The same view has sometimes surfaced in England. See, e.g., Interoffice Tels. Ltd. v. Robert Freeman Co., [1958] 1 Q.B. 190, 202 (suggesting that losses of profits through ordinary market movements should generally be regarded as foreseeable).

Such a conclusion is at least hinted at under U.C.C. § 2-715 (2007). Under that section, incidental damages available to a seller are defined without qualification. Consequential damages must be something “of which the seller at the time of contracting had reason to know. . . .” See generally Anderson, supra note 10, at 338 (explaining that the Code “states restrictions for the recovery ...