J-Law 58 — Valuation of Time

Everyone's time is to be treated as valuable. Parties may make their case on the value of their time, and the jury shall determine fair compensation.

The law already knows how to compensate intangible losses. Juries routinely put dollar figures on pain, on emotional distress, on the loss of a companion's society — injuries with no market price, valued anyway because the harm is real. Time stolen by wrongful conduct is a loss more concrete than any of these: hours have documented market rates, and a year consumed is a year of finite life gone. The system nonetheless treats a litigant's expended time as worthless while pricing every professional's time to the tenth of an hour.

A stolen year injures a person at least as much as a stolen car, and only one of them can never be returned. Letting parties prove what their time was worth — through their earnings, their obligations, their forgone work and life — and letting the jury set fair compensation extends to time the treatment every other genuine loss already receives. The jury exists exactly for valuations like this one.

The expected counterargument: time claims are speculative and duplicative, overlapping with lost wages and emotional distress damages the law already provides. Existing categories capture slivers and miss the substance — lost wages compensate employment income only, leaving the retiree, the caregiver, and the person whose stolen hours came from life rather than payroll with nothing, while emotional distress compensates suffering rather than the hours themselves. A person can lose three years without losing a paycheck or qualifying for a distress award, and current law calls that person uninjured. Speculation objections underestimate juries and overestimate the difficulty; evidence of what a person's time was worth — earnings history, market rates, documented obligations — is more concrete than the evidence behind most pain-and-suffering awards courts affirm daily. Duplication is managed the way courts always manage it, through instructions against double counting. What remains after the objections is the current rule stated nakedly: your time was worth nothing. No one believes that about their own.