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Law and Psychology

University of Michigan Law School

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Emotional distress

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Emotional Disturbance As Legal Damage, Herbert F. Goodrich Jan 1922

Emotional Disturbance As Legal Damage, Herbert F. Goodrich

Articles

MENTAL pain or anxiety the law cannot value, and does not pretend to redress, when the unlawful act complained of causes that alone. Lord Wensleydale's famous dictum in Lynch v. Knight will serve as a starting point for this discussion. His lordship's notion of mental pain is evidently that of a "state of mind" or feeling, hidden in the inner consciousness of the individual; an intangible, evanescent something too elusive for the hardheaded workaday common law to handle. Likewise, in that very interesting problem regarding recovery for damages sustained through fright, it is always assumed, tacitly or expressly, that mere …


Fright Without Physical Impact But Resulting In Physical Injury, Joseph H. Drake Jan 1910

Fright Without Physical Impact But Resulting In Physical Injury, Joseph H. Drake

Articles

The recent Maryland case of Green v. T. A. Shoemaker & Co., reported in 73 Atlantic Reporter, 688, (June, 1909) puts this jurisdiction squarely on the side of those courts that do allow recovery for fright alone, if physical injury is caused thereby. The court confesses that "the numerical weight of authority supports the general rule that there can be no recovery for nervous affections unaccompanied by contemporaneous physical injury," but nevertheless holds firmly with the minority of the courts to the view that there are exceptions to this rule and that this case falls within the exceptions.