The following paper was delivered at the 1999 Remedies Teachers Conference, at the University of Melbourne. The law of remedies is one of the most difficult parts of the law to study in an interdisciplinary way. Other kinds of law, criminal law, discrimination law and so on, have immediate contexts and obvious non-law disciplines to cast light on the supposedly neutral ways in which law is made and applied.
Civil remedies are abstract legal creations.
The coherence of the subject matter comes about through classification of remedies, itself also abstract. When we ask ourselves how these categories were first created, and how they might have changed in their application to Australian circumstances, we begin to gain a broader insight. Danzig's famous article on Hadley v Baxendale can be a model for work on Australian case law. One problem with that is that law reporting was so poor for much of the first century after the first fleet arrived in 1788. Law reporting in New South Wales only began in a recognisable, continuous fashion in the 1870s.