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Mitigation Is Best Explained As An Aspect Of Causation

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Q2. ‘Mitigation is best explained as an aspect of causation. The rules of remoteness in contract and tort are not based on causation, but their true basis remains unclear.’

lanations, Dyson notes that
Following Bridge’s comment that “the juridical basis of the duty to mitigate is obscure”, the first section of the essay will examine whether mitigation is best explained as an aspect of causation. It will be considered if causation explains mitigation, whether causation is the superior explanation, before discussing an alternative approach based on a reformulation of the compensatory principle. The second section of the essay will examine the true basis for the rules of remoteness in contract and tort, and will ask whether the …show more content…

While Goff J stated in The Elena D’Amico that the plaintiff “can only recover in respect of damage suffered by him which has been caused by the defendant’s legal wrong”, explaining mitigation in terms of causation fails to justify limiting loss where the claimant unreasonably incurred loss but did not break the chain of causation.

The explanatory limits of causation may be illustrated by the following example. Supposing that a defendant damaged a small section of his neighbour’s house roof tiling following an extravagant and negligent garden fireworks display, if the claimant sought to rebuild his house entirely, it seems highly likely that the courts would hold the claimant to have contravened obligation to mitigate; with the claimant held to have broken the chain of causation. Thus, in this instance, the causation explanation justifies the principle of mitigation’s operation as an exception to the compensatory principle.

However, the causation explanation fails to explain the principle of mitigation in other situations. For instance, if the same claimant acted unreasonably, perhaps by choosing to replace all of his roof tiling, the claimant would not

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