Reassessing the Desirability of Punitive Damages
Speaker: Dr Eleni Katsampouka, King’s College, London
Join us in person or via Zoom: https://uqz.zoom.us/j/87986839492
Abstract
Punitive damages are one of private law’s most controversial remedies. Based on two chapters of my forthcoming book, Punitive Damages: Principle and Practice, this presentation reassesses the principal objections to punitive damages and the positive reasons for retaining them in English law. Drawing in part on a comprehensive empirical study of punitive damages litigation, it argues that several pragmatic objections rest on assumptions about the remedy’s operation that the available evidence substantially undermines. It also challenges principled objections concerning the relationship between civil and criminal law, the absence of criminal safeguards, and the proper functions of private law.
The presentation then examines the general justifications for punishment and the extent to which they support punitive damages, before considering two additional benefits of the remedy as a distinct form of punishment. First, punitive damages can fill enforcement gaps where criminal, regulatory or other responses are unavailable or ineffective. Second, they provide a transparent form of punishment, preferable to the latent pursuit of punitive objectives through doctrines conventionally characterised as compensatory or restitutionary. The central argument is that punitive damages perform a distinct and valuable role as a remedy of last resort, imposing punishment in exceptional cases subject to safeguards appropriate to their civil character.
About the Speaker
Eleni is currently a lecturer at King’s College, London, having previously acted as a fellow at Mansfield College and as Fellow and Lecturer in law at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis on punitive damages was awarded the Oxford Law Faculty Subedi Prize for the best doctoral dissertation of its year. Her main interests lie in private law, especially the law of tort, and in the overlaps between the functions of the public and private law in matters of punishment. She is one of the editors of Landmark Cases in the Law of Punitive Damages and has published articles, amongst other outlets in the Modern Law Review and Cambridge Law Journal.
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