Damages and Human Rights
Professor Jason Ne Varuhas
Winner of the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize and the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.
Damages and Human Rights is a major work on awards of damages for violations of human rights that will be of compelling interest to practitioners, judges and academics alike. Damages for breaches of human rights is emerging as an important and practically significant field of law, yet the rules and principles governing such awards and their theoretical foundations remain underexplored, while courts continue to struggle to articulate a coherent law of human rights damages. The book’s focus is English law, but it draws heavily on comparative material from a range of common law jurisdictions, as well as the jurisprudence of international courts.
The current law on when damages can be obtained and how they are assessed is set out in detail and analysed comprehensively. The theoretical foundations of human rights damages are examined with a view to enhancing our understanding of the remedy and resolving the currently troubled state of human rights damages jurisprudence. The book argues that in awarding damages in human rights cases the courts should adopt a vindicatory approach, modelled on those rules and principles applied in tort cases when basic rights are violated. Other approaches are considered in detail, including the current 'mirror' approach which ties the domestic approach to damages to the European Court of Human Rights' approach to monetary compensation; an interest-balancing approach where the damages are dependent on a judicial balancing of individual and public interests; and approaches drawn from the law of state liability in EU law and United States constitutional law.
The analysis has important implications for our understanding of fundamental issues including the interrelationship between public law and private law, the theoretical and conceptual foundations of human rights law and the law of torts, the nature and functions of the damages remedy, the connection between rights and remedies, the intersection of domestic and international law, and the impact of damages liability on public funds and public administration.
The book was the winner of the 2016 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and the 2018 Inner Temple New Authors Book Prize.
Product Details
About Professor Jason Ne Varuhas
Reviews for Damages and Human Rights
From the Foreword by Professor David Feldman QC (Hon) FBA, Rouse Ball Professor of English Law, University of Cambridge
a significant work of original scholarship (...) I cannot help but to have the feeling that the book is destined to be instrumental in changing the perception of human rights as lying in a realm of public law, and of tort as lying in a separate realm of private law (...) On any view, this is a book that is likely to be read, widely and often.
Justice Gageler, High Court of Australia
Public Law Review
...a thought-provoking book which represents a valuable contribution to legal scholarship. It treats a subject of significance to lawyers, to judges and, most importantly, to those who wish to use the law to protect and vindicate their human rights.
Matthew S R Palmer, Judge of the High Court of New Zealand
Modern Law Review
Varuhas cites several cases which I decided at first instance. If I had had the benefit of some of his arguments, I might have made different decisions in some of those cases, and given better reasons in others. Any advocate or court considering these arguments will be greatly indebted to this scholarly, comprehensive and thoughtful work.
Michael Tugendhat, formerly one of Her Majesty's Justices
Cambridge Law Journal