Is plaintiff responsibility to &#39;mitigate their damages&#39; a law?
<p>Watching the People's Court, the judge says the plaintiff has a responsibility to mitigate their damages. </p>

<p>In other words the (People's) court holds the plaintiff to a standard of effort when they have lost money and are suing to get the money back.</p>

<p>My question, is this standard in the (People's) court part of contract law, or is it a legal standard the court uses in the administration of the law --and possibly open to (greatest) judicial interpretation? Or is it some reasonableness made up for television?</p>

<p>It applies in all cases, including torts against the person. It is the concept that you are not allowed to. It is based on the concept that you are not entitled to “do nothing” to fix a situation regardless of who caused it. </p>

<p>Example: you rent an apartment to a tenant and after a couple months, he breaks the lease. You are entitled to sue him for the breach of the contract. However, if you dont make a reasonable effort to find another tenant to replace him, you may not be able to collect from him the entirety of the lease he broke because you did not take action to mitigate the damages he caused. </p>

<p>One more: Someone attacks you and you suffer a broken leg. If you refduse medical treatment, get an infection in your leg and must have it amputated, it is possible the attacker will be responsible only for the initial injury and not the resulting infection because you refused to mitigate the damages caused by his tort against you. </p>

<p>The duty to mitigate damages is a common law principle, established by case law, that applies in almost all lawsuits seeking money damages in every U.S. jurisdiction. It is not made up for television.</p>

<p>It is part of the substantive law of damages in contract, tort and other other kinds of common law suits and is applied to statutory claims for compensatory damages as well in most circumstances.</p>

<p>All forms of law are open to interpretation in light of the facts and circumstances. In some situations, it may be very clear what steps were necessary to mitigate damages. In others, it may be quite unclear, although case law often provides meaningful guidance on this question in particular kinds of fact patterns.</p>

contract-law