| Venue: | 1 Cir |
| Facts: | Donau Maru spills oil into Boston Harbor. The Tamara therefore has to dock at another pier, incurring all manner of costs (fuel, transport, docking, labor...). |
| Posture: | Suit in admiralty; recovery denied by the district court. Appeal. |
| Issue: | Can you get damages for purely economic harm? |
| Holding: | No. Affirmed. |
| Rule: | If you don't have either physical injury or property damage, there would have to be some very special circumstances to permit recovery. |
| Reasoning: | Courts do sometimes depart from precedent, when changing circumstances
render it nonsencical.
But that's not the case here. Any time you have an accident, there is going to be possible financial harm. The fact that it's foreseeable means you could get a lot of plaintiffs: when speaking of financial injury, foreseeability is not a good discriminator between those who can recover and those who cannot (the way it is for regular injury). And torts is costly enough as it is, without layering on tons of extra parties. And really, the needs aren't the same: financially injured people are able to arrange for cheaper alternative compensation. Like insurance, for example. Or building service level agreements into contracts. Plus, we'd get undesirable outcomes: if everyone who is financially impacted by an accident could sue, we might not be able to have things like affordable driving insurance. There are exceptions, of course, where the "administrative" and "proportionality" problems are less significant, or there's some strong countervailing consideration that encourages imposition of liability. For example, physical injuries that also cause financial harm. Or negligent misrepresentation. And we do allow this sort of recovery for intentional nuisance; we're just not going to expand it to negligently caused harm. |
| Dicta: | |