This paper examines an idea which has made some headway into legal scholarship and case law, namely, that the violation of a right ought to sound in substantial (compensatory) damages in and by itself, independently of any factual loss caused to the claimant. This doctrine of ‘normative damages’ was rejected, rightly, by the High Court of Australia in the wrongful imprisonment case of Lewis v. ACT in 2020. However, although the rejection was unanimous, its clarity was undermined by the fact that the issue of normative damages was intertwined with considerations of causal counterfactuals and the definition of false imprisonment. This article considers the doctrine in a broader perspective, examining where it has come from and arguing that normative damages are wrong as a matter of principle: not only do they contradict foundational principles of the Anglo-Commonwealth law of damages, they effectively amount to considering the same injury twice.

中文翻译：

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反对规范性损害赔偿

本文研究了一个在法律学术和判例法方面取得了一些进展的想法，即侵犯权利应该本身就实质性（补偿性）损害赔偿而言，独立于对索赔人造成的任何事实损失。澳大利亚高等法院在 2020 年刘易斯诉 ACT 非法监禁案中正确地驳回了“规范性损害赔偿”原则。然而，尽管驳回是一致的，但其明确性因以下事实而受到损害：规范性损害赔偿与因果反事实的考虑和非法监禁的定义交织在一起。本文从更广泛的角度考虑了该学说，研究了它的来源，并认为规范性损害赔偿在原则上是错误的：