In America, we say that liberty and justice are for all. We inscribe it on marble. We teach it in classrooms. We pledge it with our hand over our heart.
But that promise is not tested when things are going well. The real test of whether we mean it comes when someone has lost everything money can’t buy.
- When the life someone loved has been stolen.
- When freedom is shackled by injury.
- When joy, peace, and ability to feel whole has been ripped away.
That’s when we decide what our nation’s promise means.
Perfect justice would be the power to rewind time – to stop harm before it ever happened. It would be the ability to return a child into the loving arms of their parents, to restore life to what it was before the trauma. But we do not have that power—at least not in this world.
What we have is America’s civil justice system. Under our laws, money damages are the only tool we have to protect the constitutional rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Money damages are the only remedy the law allows us for harm that can never be undone.
So I say without hesitation or apology: money damages are righteous. They are dignified. They are moral. They are the beating heart of civil justice in our free society.
The Founders didn’t stumble into our system of money damages by accident. It was written with blood and conviction. More than two centuries later, it remains the moral compass of our civil justice system.
If you are a lawyer who fights for non-economic damages, you are fighting for civil rights in the deepest, most constitutional sense. That life is sacred. That liberty is inviolable. That the pursuit of happiness is not a privilege for the few, but a right for all.
When those most precious rights are robbed, we are the last line of defense. We are the ones in the courtroom trenches:
- Battling corporate greed that puts profits over people.
- Demanding a government that serves its citizens, not shields its own.
- Taking on insurance giants that belittle human pain.
- Standing up for the vulnerable.
- Giving voice to the voiceless.
And centuries of American law backs you. Generations of trial lawyers, courageous judges, and principled jurists have firmly wedged open the courthouse doors so that the people, individual people, always have recourse to money damages against the powerful. Justice does not belong to the privileged, it belongs to the people.
In Washington, WPI 30.06 tells us to include each and every non-economic harm separately. Not lumped together. Not as an afterthought. But each—destruction, disfigurement, grief, pain, humiliation, inconvenience, loss of enjoyment of life—as an individual act of justice. That’s not just a procedure. It is humanity, written into law. If we ever forget their value, we forget what justice is for.
Money damages are more than compensation. They are the currency of accountability. When a jury returns a full and fair verdict, valuing every human harm that’s been done, they are speaking to institutions that feel nothing. They are saying: life has value, liberty matters, and human suffering cannot be ignored.
Justice isn’t complete without the courage to value what can’t be replaced.
That’s the soul of non-economic damages.
And that is the American promise.
