Remoteness of damage in contract law: An agreement-centred approach

This thesis concerns the legal rules of contractual remoteness: these rules govern the extent of liability that is imposed on a breaching party to compensate for the adverse consequences that the breach causes. It is argued that the allocation of responsibility for such consequences is contained implicitly in the contract: every contract extends beyond its express terms, and the allocation of responsibility for the consequences of breach is one of the matters to which it extends. This latter assertion is supported by the argument that an assumption of responsibility for the consequences of breach is a fundamental part of what it means to make a promise. Hence the rules of remoteness are merely a specialised application of the general legal principles that are used to discover the unexpressed part of an agreement. These legal principles can be seen in operation in the implication of terms and the interpretation of expressed terms.