IL DANNO NON PATRIMONIALE DA INADEMPIMENTO: PROFILI DI COMPARAZIONE.

A crucial issue in current private law is the progress of claims for non pecuniary losses in the event of a breach of contract. This comparative analysis attemps to investigate on how and to what extent such damages are awarded in order to compensate the injured contractual party. Among common law legal systems, UK, the U.S.A., Canada and Australia jurisdictions have been considered, while as far as civil law systems are concerned the Italian legal system has been investigated . The present research examines the expanding range of interests protected by contract law in the different examined jurisdictions, being the phenomenon of contractualisation of social life closely connected to the recognition of the awarding of non pecuniary damages. As a result, it seems that the law in action appears to be the same in common law countries as well as in Italy (in the sense that these damages might be awarded given certain condition), while the differences still remaining in the blank letter law are under a sooth process of harmonisation. The explanation to this result seems to be that the law in action as well as the European Private Law stimulate the reversal of the traditional relation rule/exception adopted in common law (that it: refuse compensation apart from some specific type of contracts). But the main argument put forward at the end of the present research is that the criterion of patrimoniality might not be the right one in order to evaluate the recognition of damages. A monocentric approach to the awarding of damages for breach of contract might, on the contrary, solve in a better manner the problem both of the nature and of the evaluation of non pecuniary losses for breach of contract.