1 Ohio Law Rep. 315 | Ohio | 1903
The request of the ice company for a proposition for furnishing the. shaft gaye prominence to its desire for a definite understand
Nor -does it appear that the circuit court gave adequate compen'sation for the breach when it required the iron company to remit from the judgment which it had recovered in the common pleas court interest upon the value of the machine for the thirty-three days which it found tó have intervened between the time stipulated for the delivery of the shaft and the date of its actual delivery. When the breach of a contract consists in the failure to pay money, interest is allowed as compensation because, according to common understanding, it actually represents the value of the use of the money. But in this case the parties were not stipulating for the use of money, nor could there have been in the contemplation of either party damages resulting from the failure to pay money.
The celebrated case of Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Exch., 341, has been generally accepted as defining correctly the principles upon which damages should be assessed for a breach of contract. It has been so accepted in this state. They are such damages as arise naturally from the breach of the contract, or such as may reasonably be supposed to have been in the contemplation of both parties, at the time they made the contract, as the probable result of the breach of it. Later decisions show that there has been difficulty in the application of these principles to particular cases, and that case has been many times interpreted and its statements paraphrased, though the correctness of the principles which it defines has been generally if not' universally accepted. It does not appear that such view has ever been taken of the case as would justify the assessment of damages for the deprivation of the use of property by the computation of interest upon its value. Nor upon the other hand, would it justify the recovery by the ice company in the present case of the large profits which, as its testimony tended to show, were probably lost by reason of the delay. In that respect the case
Judgments of the circuit and common pleas courts reversed.