Tort Liability Purposes: Compensation or Prevention (Comparative and Economic Analysis)

At the times of Ancient Rome, there was no differentiation between tort and criminal law. Only towards to the end of existence of The Western Roman Empire the division of these branches according to their competence formed: criminal (or administrative) law is called upon to punish and apply sanctions for the purpose of prevention, and tort law is intended to compensate for harm arising from a wrong and to recovery in the previous state. Nevertheless, the issue of what kind of tort liability should be, in a view of the fact that purely compensatory function does not cope with the task of protecting violated civil rights, is increasingly being raised in recent years. First of all, the subject of the research is a comparative analysis of such a legal institution as punitive damages, which is especially prevalent in the US law. Law & Economics approaches to goals and functions of punitive damages as a remedy are taken into account as well. The result of the research is an emphasizing of already existing institutions in Russian law at the moment that are of a punitive nature, for example, fines in a consumer law and statutory damages in disputes about violation of exclusive rights. According to the results, it should be said that there is no legal system where punitive function will be a general approach in tort law. Finally, in our opinion, it is impossible especially without scrupulous legal policy, economic and comparative analysis to implement punitive damages in Russian law in toto.