Taking as its starting-point the accounts offered in two recently published practitioner books on the law of damages, this article reviews some key challenges which must be faced by anyone concerned to state or work with this area, once it is recognized that the ‘‘law of damages’’ cannot rationally be confined to the law of compensatory money awards for common law wrongs. Those challenges comprise the integration and/or rationalization of equity’s money awards, non-compensatory money awards, and money awards for statutory causes of action .

2003 saw the publication of two major practitioner works on the law of damages. The first, McGregor on Damages ,1 should need no introduction. Besides its monumental size, the 17th edition is remarkable for the reason that, with the exception of four of its 45 chapters, it remains the work of one author. The second work, The Law of Damages ,2 is a new multi-authored work published as part of Butterworths’ recently initiated ‘‘Common Law Series’’. That series is very obviously designed to provide competitor texts to Sweet & Maxwell’s long-established ‘‘Common Law Library’’, of which McGregor forms part. Forced to choose between such obvious competitors, which would it be? And, more broadly, what are some major challenges that must be faced by anyone concerned to describe the law of damages at the start of the 21st century?

McGregor notes that the 17th edition of McGregor has undergone a ‘‘more radical overhaul’’ than previous editions. However, that overhaul has mainly involved rewriting and reordering within particular chapters; the work’s overall structure is virtually

513