So as I said in the last segment, the principle of expectation damages that the non breaching party gets to be put in the position that they would have been in had the contract been fulfilled. But as you start to probe that concept, you're going to start to realize that the position you would have been in had the contract been fulfilled can be sort of a deep like metaphysical question, right? Because you're asking about sort of a counter factual universe that doesn't come to pass and if you think about a sort of butterfly effect right? Like one breach of contract can mean a whole different world because of all the things that did or didn't happen that flowed from one particular breach. So there are a couple of constraining principles and rules on expectation damages, that are helpful to lay out in the beginning. Those are foreseeability, certainty and avoidability. So I'm going to offer a somewhat fanciful example here in order to illustrate how these things play out. Just so you can see the logic of the kinds of claims that courts are basically not going to entertain for damages. So let's imagine for a moment that I'm a computer programmer. I got my college degree in computer science and I'm quite a good coder. My actual dream though is to be a real estate developer. And I have this plan of buying and renovating, what's currently an abandoned warehouse downtown the city I live in and making it into a beautiful mall basically like a shopping mall. So I realized that in order to get a loan, a commercial real estate loan, I look around and I see I need to have a record of steady stable employment. So I take a job with a local software company and they promised me one year of employment. And the one year of employment is just cause employment is not at will, right? So they promised me that unless I mess up, I can work there for one year as a coder and that's the deal. And what I know is with a year of steady work, I'm going to have the documentation that makes me look stable enough financially, to be able to apply for a big loan. And then eventually to become a big real estate developer and I'm going to get rich and famous, etc. Okay, so let's imagine that after a few months the software company fires me. They fire me for no apparent reason, they just have taken. They just don't like me very much. I have felt sort of disrespected in the day I got there and I know I'm not being fired for any good reason. My work has been excellent and I have learned just enough contracts to be dangerous. And so I sue and I go to court and I say I'm suing for expectation damages. The company that has fired me owes me the amount of money that it would take to put me in the position I would have been and had this contract been fulfilled. Had this contract been fulfilled, not only would I have been paid my salary for the year, also, they were meeting nine months of the salary. But I also would have gotten alone a commercial real estate loan to be able to buy this abandoned warehouse downtown and the renovation loan, a construction loan to renovate it. This was going to, over the next 10 years make me tons of money. So I'm losing basically millions of dollars of profit, just because I have been fired from this job, which otherwise pays, I don't know, some $5,000 a month. So I say actually I'm claiming $5 million dollars in damages because if not for being fired from this job, I would have been able to become an extremely successful real estate developer. Okay, there are at least three reasons doctrinally why this claim is going to fail. The first one is, the doctrine of foreseeability. Doctrine of foreseeability says, you don't get money, damages for losses that were not foreseeable at the time of drafting the contract. Damages are not recoverable for loss that the party in breach does not have reason to foresee as a probable result of the breach when the contract was made. So the first thing that my breaching employer says to me is yes, we have breached. However, there's no reason that we software company, would believe that firing you, has the sort of natural consequence of you being unable to get a loan for the purchase and renovation of commercial real estate. Those two things just don't go together. And indeed, if you look at the rule here, the restatement rule, section 351, it says the loss can be foreseeable because it follows from the breach, either in the ordinary course of events. Or because the party in breach has reason to know. And the software company says this is not the thing we assume liability for. We would never think that firing an employee means that they're going to lose out on a huge real estate transaction. So foreseeability is a limitation on damages. The other thing, I think you can see right away here, is that there ought to be a limitation based on the fact that it's not obvious that I'm actually going to become a millionaire real estate developer, right? That limitation is called a limitation on uncertain damages. The limitation on uncertain damages says that when damages are too uncertain, you can't seek expectation damages for outcomes that are too hard to measure. So in this case, what the breaching software company would say is, yes, we know we have fired you. And let's even say we stipulate that we fired you in breach of our contract. But you really can't prove that you were going to make millions of dollars in this real estate deal, right? That's actually a really unclear outcome here. There's all kinds of things that could have happened, you could have made millions of dollars or you could have not made millions of dollars. This is an unusual venture. How are you going to prove that your inability to purchase and renovate an abandoned warehouse and make a mall was really going to make you millions of dollars. The third limitation here is the limitation on avoidable damages on compensation for losses that were actually avoidable. So imagine for a moment that I'm working in a relatively bustling software development market. One of the claims that my employer, my breaching employer might make is listen, there's actually a ton of other work in this town for coders. And so actually we don't even have to pay you your lost salary. Forget the money for the venture, you didn't get to go in with the real estate. If other firms would have hired you, we don't have to pay you for work, you didn't take basically. So if other firms would have hired you for similar jobs, then actually all we owe you is the difference between the salary we promised you in the salary that they have given you. This particular concept of avoidability is sometimes called the duty to mitigate and we're going to push on this concept a little bit more. In the next segment, when we talk about the case of Shirley Maclaine Parker versus 20th century Fox.