Definition
Remittit damna (Latin: "he remits the damages") is a formal entry made on the court record by a plaintiff declaring that he voluntarily surrenders or remits a portion of the damages awarded to him by the court or jury. The entry operates as a condition attached to the continuation of a judgment: the plaintiff accepts a reduced sum in order to preserve the judgment itself, typically in response to a court's finding that the original award was excessive.
Remittit damna is the procedural instrument underlying what modern practice calls a remittitur — the plaintiff's formal acceptance of a reduced damages figure as an alternative to a new trial on damages.
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Common Confusion
REMITTIT DAMNA / REMITTITUR: These terms are closely related but not identical. Remittit damna is the formal record entry — the plaintiff's written declaration relinquishing part of the award. Remittitur is the broader procedural doctrine or the court's order conditioning denial of a new trial on the plaintiff's acceptance of a reduced sum. In practice, modern courts use "remittitur" almost exclusively. Researchers encountering remittit damna in historical sources should understand they are looking at the formal pleading act, not the court's ruling that prompted it.
REMITTIT DAMNA / ADDITUR: The inverse procedure, additur, involves a defendant's acceptance of an increased award as an alternative to retrial. The two are frequently discussed together in historical treatments of excessive verdict practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
Remittit damna is primarily a historical term. It surfaces in older reports, treatises, and digests — particularly English common law sources and American cases from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — as the technical Latin label for what modern practice simply calls a remittitur. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century materials should expect this form and should not assume that the absence of the word "remittitur" means the concept is absent; the same procedure may appear under the Latin phrase.
The term almost never appears in modern American pleadings or judicial opinions. If you encounter it in a twentieth-century or later source, it is almost certainly a historical reference or a treatise tracing doctrinal lineage.
One research trap: because remittit damna and remittitur are used interchangeably in secondary literature, search queries limited to either term alone will miss relevant material. Cross-search both when tracing the doctrine through the corpus.
The underlying doctrine — judicial power to condition denial of a new trial on the plaintiff's acceptance of reduced damages — has significant constitutional dimensions in federal court that the historical Latin form does not signal. Modern research into whether a federal court may order remittitur (and whether additur is constitutionally permissible under the Seventh Amendment) requires moving beyond the Latin terminology entirely.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions offer identical, minimal entries: the term is defined as a record entry by which the plaintiff declares that he remits part of the damages awarded. The definition is accurate as far as it goes but provides no procedural context — it does not explain when such an entry would be made, whether it was compelled or voluntary, or what effect it had on the remainder of the judgment. Neither edition distinguishes the term from remittitur or notes the parallel inverse procedure of additur.
The brevity of the historical dictionary entries reflects the term's function as a technical Latin label for a well-understood procedural act, not a doctrine requiring extended definition. Researchers should not mistake the short entry for an indication that the underlying procedure was minor; judicial management of excessive verdicts was a significant area of common law practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
The remittitur doctrine that remittit damna underlies is recognized in both federal and state courts, but its constitutional status differs. Federal courts may order remittitur conditioned on acceptance by the plaintiff; additur is generally held to violate the Seventh Amendment's right to jury trial in federal practice. State courts vary, and many permit additur as well as remittitur. Historical sources using remittit damna predate this federal constitutional analysis and should not be read as resolving it.
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