What are the two categories of remedies?

Answer 1

There are 2 very broad categories of remedies that courts can award: legal remedies and equitable remedies.

The distinction between the two is largely a historical artifact, having its origins in the courts of England dating back to the middle ages.

The courts of law, at the time, were extremely rigid and narrow in the types of claims they would hear, and the procedure that had to be followed. As a result, many people who had claims or defenses which were perfectly reasonable would lose their cases.

This led to a large number of people going directly to the King for relief, because the King had residual judicial power, and was not bound by the strict rules of the courts of law, allowing him to make his decisions on basic principles of fairness and justice. The large number of these claims led Kings to delegate their judicial power to courts of equity, which heard cases that the courts of law would not, and decide cases on prevailing ideas of justice and fairness, rather than the rigid rules followed by the courts of law.

One of the major distinctions between the law courts and equity courts was the type of remedy that can be granted. Generally, law courts could only award monetary damages to compensate for a specific injury. Sometimes, this is an inadequate remedy.

Equitable remedies exist to fill in the gaps: courts of equity could award injunctions (a court order requiring a party to do something, or to stop doing it, for example). Also, in contract actions, rather than using money as a substitute for performance, the courts could order the breaching party to actually perform under the contract.

Now, jump ahead a few hundred years to the U.S. legal system. We inherited many of our legal traditions from those of England as they existed in the late 1700s, including the law/equity distinction.

However, the federal courts in the U.S., and the courts of most states, have merged the law and equity courts into a single system. However, the law/equity distinction remains important, since it often dictates what remedies can be granted (and most courts will not grant equitable remedies unless it can be shown that the legal remedy is inadequate).