Definition
General damages are compensatory damages that flow naturally and necessarily from the type of wrong alleged — losses so inherent to the injury that the law presumes them without requiring the plaintiff to produce specific dollar-amount proof. They stand in contrast to special damages, which arise from the particular circumstances of the plaintiff's situation and must be specifically pleaded and proven.
In personal injury and tort practice, general damages typically include pain and suffering, emotional distress, loss of enjoyment of life (hedonic damages), disfigurement, and loss of consortium. These are harms the law recognizes as ordinarily accompanying the kind of injury at issue, even though they resist precise monetary calculation.
In contract law, general damages are the losses that arise naturally and in the ordinary course from the breach itself — the baseline expectation loss that any party in the plaintiff's position would suffer from that type of breach. This usage tracks the Hadley v. Baxendale foreseeability framework, under which general damages are recoverable as a matter of course, while consequential damages require special notice.
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Common Confusion
GENERAL DAMAGES vs. SPECIAL DAMAGES: The distinction is one of the most persistently misapplied in damages law. General damages are presumed from the nature of the harm; special damages depend on the plaintiff's specific circumstances and must be both pleaded with particularity and proven at trial. Failing to plead special damages by name can forfeit them entirely. The line between the two categories shifts by jurisdiction and by the type of claim — what counts as general in one context may be special in another. Researchers working across torts and contract sources should not assume uniform usage.
GENERAL DAMAGES vs. COMPENSATORY DAMAGES: General damages are a subset of compensatory damages, not a synonym. Compensatory damages include both general and special damages; the broader term encompasses everything designed to make the plaintiff whole. Using the terms interchangeably — common in older sources — obscures a meaningful structural distinction.
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Why It Matters in Research
The term carries different operational weight depending on the procedural context. In pleading, the historical significance of "general damages" was primarily about what a plaintiff could recover without specific itemization in the declaration — damages presumed from the pleaded wrong. Modern pleading practice has relaxed many of those formal requirements, but the distinction still matters for notice pleading, pre-trial disclosure of damages computations, and jury instruction drafting.
In tort research, general damages are the category most resistant to quantification and most contested at trial and on appeal. Pain and suffering, emotional distress, and hedonic damages have been the target of legislative damages-cap statutes in many jurisdictions, making this a live area of jurisdictional divergence. Researchers examining damages caps must identify whether the cap applies to general damages only, to noneconomic damages (a sometimes-overlapping but not identical category), or to total compensatory damages.
In contract research, the general/special damages split is foundational to understanding consequential damages analysis. Many commercial contracts attempt to exclude consequential damages by clause — a provision that has no effect on general damages recovery. Reading limitation-of-liability clauses requires clear understanding of what each category covers.
Historical sources use "general damages" almost exclusively in the pleading sense — what could be recovered under the general ad damnum clause — rather than the modern substantive sense of non-economic tort harms. A researcher reading nineteenth-century treatise discussions of general damages is reading about pleading mechanics, not about pain and suffering law. The substantive tort usage is largely a twentieth-century development.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill are in precise agreement, reproducing nearly identical language drawn from Greenleaf's Evidence: general damages are "such damages as necessarily result from the injury complained of, and which may be shown under the ad damnum, or general allegation of damages at the end of the declaration." The shared Greenleaf citation (2 Greenl. Ev. § 254) signals that both dictionaries are drawing from the same treatise root rather than independent formulation.
Bouvier's entry is unhelpfully truncated, directing the reader to "DAM-" — a cross-reference to the broader DAMAGES entry — without providing a standalone definition.
What all three historical dictionaries share is an exclusively procedural frame. The question they answer is: what must a plaintiff specifically plead versus what may be recovered under general pleading? None of them address what modern courts and practitioners most often mean by the term: the category of non-economic, non-itemizable harms in tort. The entire modern substantive architecture of pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of consortium damages is invisible in these sources. Researchers should treat the historical dictionary treatment as a pleading artifact, not as a foundation for modern damages analysis.
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Jurisdictional Note
Many states have enacted statutory caps on noneconomic or general damages, particularly in medical malpractice and products liability contexts. The scope and constitutionality of those caps varies substantially by state. In contract disputes, the Uniform Commercial Code governs whether consequential damages may be limited by agreement, but the baseline general damages framework remains common law.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
remedies_2: General Damages — Pain and Suffering, Emotional Distress, Loss of Consortium, and Hedonic Damages (The Law Mind Remedies & Equity Encyclopedia)
torts_167: Damages and Remedies in Tort — General Damages (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)
remedies_1: Compensatory Damages — General Principles, Purposes, and the Make-Whole Standard (The Law Mind Remedies & Equity Encyclopedia)
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