Hawkins v. McGee

84 N.H. 114, 146 A. 641 (1929)

Supreme Court of New Hampshire · 1929

• Expectation damages
• Express warranty
• Difference-in-value measure

Supplemental case. Hawkins v. McGee is not in the assigned reading for Contract Law: Rules, Cases, and Problems (2d ed.). It appears in many first-year contracts courses as the “Hairy Hand” case and as a vehicle for introducing the expectation interest. Professor Oranburg uses it on Day 1 as a cold-call supplement, not as a doctrinal anchor. Students should read it for the flavor of legal analysis, not as exam material.

Facts

George Hawkins, an eighteen-year-old in New Hampshire, had a badly scarred right hand. Dr. Edward McGee, a surgeon, repeatedly approached the family offering to perform a skin-graft procedure that he said would restore the hand to perfection. He said variously that he would “guarantee to make the hand a hundred per cent perfect hand” and that Hawkins would “only have to be in the hospital three or four days.” The procedure was performed; the doctor grafted skin from Hawkins’s chest. The result was disfiguring: the grafted skin, taken from the chest, was thick and grew hair, and Hawkins’s hand was substantially worse than before. He sued the doctor for breach of an express warranty of a perfect hand.

Holding

The New Hampshire Supreme Court held that Hawkins could recover damages measured by the difference between the value of the hand as warranted (a perfect, hundred-percent hand) and the value of the hand as it actually was after the surgery. Damages for pain and suffering attributable to the surgery itself were not recoverable as breach-of-contract damages because the pain was an incident of performance, not of breach. Hawkins could also recover the incidental losses fairly traceable to the breach.

Reasoning

The court distinguished between tort and contract recovery. A surgeon does not warrant a result simply by performing surgery; he warrants only reasonable care. But where a surgeon expressly warrants a specific result, the warranty becomes contractual, and breach is measured the way other contract breaches are measured. The expectation interest puts the plaintiff in the position he would have been in had the warranty been performed (the warranted “perfect” hand). Pain and suffering are not part of that difference; they were part of the bargained-for price of the procedure.

Why it matters

Hawkins is the most cited “first day of Contracts” case in American legal education. It introduces:

• The expectation interest as the default measure of contract damages
• The distinction between tort and contract liability in the same transaction
• The idea that express warranties are enforceable contractual promises distinct from the underlying duty of reasonable care
• The legal-realism point that a doctor’s enthusiastic sales talk can ripen into a contract

The case does not appear in the assigned reading for this course because the casebook’s Chapter 1 introduces these themes through different cases. Professor Oranburg uses Hawkins as a cold-call vehicle on Day 1 to introduce the expectation-interest framing that will return in Module VII, but the case is not on the exam and is not in the syllabus’s case map.

Hawkins v. McGee, 84 N.H. 114, 146 A. 641 (1929).