Remedies Reclassified

This book is about the law of remedies. It establishes the boundaries of this discrete area of law and provides a new classification of remedies. Zakrzewski first examines the difficulties of the term 'remedy', and identifies the most robust notion of a remedy. Remedies are broadly approximated to court orders; more strictly, they are the rights arising from these orders. This enables a rigorous separation of remedies from substantive rights, that is, rights which exist before the making of a court order. The author then reviews established classifications of remedies, showing how they are seriously deficient and developing a new taxonomy based upon the relationship between substantive rights and remedies. This provides a much better understanding of that relationship, especially of the role of judicial discretion in the granting of remedies. The book then moves on to provide an overview of remedies in private law within the new analytical framework. It shows how each order that may be made by a court in a civil case gives effect to the substantive rights of the parties to the dispute. Particular primary and secondary (or remedial) rights, such as rights to damages, are carefully disentangled from the remedies which effectuate them, and the similarities and differences between various remedies are revealed. This book provides a new way to view remedies and substantive rights. It insists that the law of remedies must not reproduce parts of the law of substantive rights under a different name. For the first time, remedies are established as a stable and distinct area of law.