Law professor Robert Rabin has written Intangible Damages in American Tort Law: A Roadmap. Here is the abstract:
This paper is meant to provide a succinct roadmap to the many pathways taken in providing recovery for intangible harm in tort. The paper was initially prepared for a comparative law conference, and in that setting, I assumed a lack of close familiarity with the historical origins and surprisingly broad expanse of recovery for intangible harm in American tort law. While succinctly presented, the present revised treatment, for those conversant with the US system, is meant to be comprehensive, addressing defamation and privacy, no-fault and tort reform, as well as the more conventional common law topics of intangible damages in cases of intentional and accidental harm.
This piece is a helfpul collection of ways in which U.S. tort law does (and does not) recognize certain kinds of difficult-to-quantify damages. Parts of Prof. Rabin's piece bring to mind some of the arguments in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, now pending in the Supreme Court. Spokeo concerns the circumstances under which a suit for statutory (non-actual) damages presents a "case" or "controversy" that may be resolved by an article III federal court.
