Definition
Remittitur damnum is a procedural act by which a plaintiff formally surrenders, on the record, the portion of a jury's damages award that exceeds the amount claimed in the declaration. By filing the remittitur damnum, the plaintiff voluntarily abates the excess and accepts a reduced judgment, thereby curing the variance between the amount pleaded and the amount found by the jury. The term is Latin: remittitur meaning "it is sent back" or "it is remitted," and damnum meaning "loss" or "damage." The combined phrase describes the plaintiff's formal relinquishment of the surplus damages on the face of the record.
This is distinct from the modern judicial doctrine of remittitur, under which a court conditions denial of a new trial on the plaintiff's acceptance of a reduced award. Remittitur damnum is the plaintiff's own act of record, not a court order.
Common Confusion
Remittitur damnum is easily conflated with remittitur in its modern usage. In contemporary practice, remittitur refers to a court's power to reduce an excessive jury verdict, typically by offering the plaintiff a choice between accepting a lower figure and submitting to a new trial. Remittitur damnum is narrower and historically specific: it is the plaintiff's unilateral act of abating the excess to conform the judgment to the pleadings, and it operates on the record rather than through judicial order. The two share the same Latin root and a common purpose — reducing the damages recovered — but they describe different procedural mechanisms and different actors. Researchers using historical sources must not read modern remittitur doctrine backward into references to remittitur damnum.
Why It Matters in Research
Remittitur damnum is a term of the common law pleading system and will appear almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century sources. Its natural habitat is the era of strict declaration practice, when a plaintiff who recovered more than was laid in the declaration faced a potentially fatal variance. The remittitur damnum was the procedural solution: the plaintiff formally abandoned the excess on the record, salvaging the judgment rather than risking reversal or a new trial.
Researchers working in nineteenth-century tort or contract case law should watch for the term in contexts involving jury awards that outrun the ad damnum clause of the declaration. The filing of a remittitur damnum does not reflect a concession of weakness; it is a technical cure for a pleading problem.
A critical trap in historical sources: because the modern doctrine of remittitur also results in a plaintiff accepting less than the jury awarded, later editors and secondary writers sometimes used the terms interchangeably. If a historical case or treatise uses remittitur to describe a plaintiff's voluntary act on the record (rather than a court-conditioned ruling), the reference is almost certainly to remittitur damnum. The distinction matters because the procedural posture, the party acting, and the doctrinal basis differ entirely.
The multi-plaintiff limitation noted by Bouvier is also a practical research flag. Where an action was brought on behalf of multiple plaintiffs — as in the wrongful death context Bouvier describes — one plaintiff could not unilaterally file a remittitur damnum on behalf of all. This created complications in joint actions and generated case law on the authority of named plaintiffs to act for co-plaintiffs or beneficiaries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the primary definition in the Law Mind corpus. Bouvier describes remittitur damnum as "the act of the plaintiff upon the record, whereby he abates the excess of damages found by the jury beyond the sum laid in the declaration," citing 1 Saunders 285 n. 6 and 4 Conn. 109. The definition is tight and functional. Bouvier also flags the multi-plaintiff restriction, noting that the device cannot be filed by one of several plaintiffs, and illustrates the point with a wrongful death action brought on behalf of a widow, children, and parents.
No other historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus addresses the term independently. The concept is sufficiently technical and archaic that it falls outside the scope of most general legal dictionaries of the period. Researchers should treat Bouvier as the primary authority here and supplement with treatises on common law pleading — particularly those addressing variance between the declaration and the verdict — for fuller doctrinal context.
Jurisdictional Note
Remittitur damnum is a creature of common law pleading procedure and was recognized wherever the common law declaration system was in force. Its practical significance declined sharply with the adoption of code pleading in American jurisdictions beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and effectively disappeared with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938. The doctrine may retain residual relevance in jurisdictions that preserved common law pleading forms into the twentieth century.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Damages and Remedies in Tort — Remittitur and Additur (The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia)