ABSTRACT
This paper aims to identify and order the harms or losses which the law might compensate (or more widely redress) in actions for breach of privacy. Part I identifies three such detriments, to which all the others are reducible: pecuniary loss, mental distress and breach of privacy per se. Part II seeks to explain why they cannot all coexist at the same time. This is because they are based on two incompatible ways of understanding the relationship between wrong and harm, which ought not to be conflated: one that regards the loss as the detrimental consequences of the wrong (on respectively the claimant’s ‘pocket’ and his emotional tranquillity); the other that treats the harm as the wrong itself, i.e. the invasion to – or loss of – the claimant’s privacy. Part III examines some of the consequences the choice we make between them has on key issues within the law of privacy.
