A legal remedy, also referred to as judicial relief or a judicial remedy, is the means with which a court of law, usually in the exercise of civil law jurisdiction, enforces a right, imposes a penalty, or makes another court order to impose its will in order to compensate for the harm of a wrongful act inflicted upon an individual.

In common law jurisdictions and mixed civil-common law jurisdictions, the law of remedies distinguishes between a legal remedy (e.g. a specific amount of monetary damages) and an equitable remedy (e.g. injunctive relief or specific performance). Another type of remedy available in these systems is declaratory relief, where a court determines the rights of the parties to action without awarding damages or ordering equitable relief. The type of legal remedies to be applied in specific cases depend on the nature of the wrongful act and its liability.

In English and American jurisprudence, there is a legal maxim (albeit one sometimes honored in the breach) that for every right, there is a remedy; where there is no remedy, there is no right. That is, lawmakers claim to provide appropriate remedies to protect rights. This legal maxim was first enunciated by William Blackstone: "It is a settled and invariable principle in the laws of England, that every right when with-held must have a remedy, and every injury its proper redress." In addition to the United Kingdom and the United States, legal remedy is a concept widely practiced in the legal system of a variety of countries, though approached differently.

There are three crucial categories of judicial remedies in common law systems. The legal remedy originates from the law courts of England and is seen in the form of a payment of money to the victim, commonly referred to as damages or replevin. Damages aim at making up the harm that a breaching party has committed to the victim. In the history of the English legal system, the legal remedy only existed in the form of monetary relief, and therefore the victim must petition through a separate system if the victim wanted other forms of compensation. Although the courtrooms and proceedings have been integrated, the distinction between requests for money versus action is still present. Non-monetary compensation refers to the second category of judicial remedies—equitable remedies. This type of remedy comes from the equitable jurisdiction developed in the English Court of Chancery and Court of Exchequer. Declaratory remedies make up the third category of judicial remedies. Different from the other two categories, declaratory remedies usually involve a court's determination of how the law applies to particular facts without any command to the parties. Courts give declaratory remedies about many different kinds of questions, including whether a person has a legal status, who the owner of a property is, whether a statute has a particular meaning, or what the rights are under a contract. Moreover, legal expenses including the ones generated by bringing a lawsuit against the breaching party to attain legal remedies do not count toward consequential damages and be charged from the defendant, unless stated in the contract otherwise. In the U.S., injunction is the most common type of equitable remedies, and failure to comply with an injunction can lead to results ranging from fines to imprisonment.

  • Accounting for profits

Accounting for profits is an inquiry into the amount of gains that the defendant benefited from his or her wrongs. Accounting is more commonly practiced in cases against a fiduciary or breach of contract in which the ascertainment of the defendant's profits is important. Declaratory remedies are a component of preventive adjudication because in cases that demand only declaration, no actual harm or loss has been incurred by the plaintiff. As technologies develop, the prevalence of mass media makes legal information more accessible and thus poses a larger threat to the process of adjudication. Trial-level remedies are designed for judges to mitigate the impact of pretrial publicity without infringing the freedom of expression for the press.

Monetary compensatory damages, along with injunction, are most commonly used in the United States. Similar to the U.S., the courts in the United Kingdom tend to award monetary compensatory damages in tort cases. However, punitive damages are not applicable in the legal systems of the U.K. and Japan or the contractual cases in Australia and occupy a limited but expanding scope in the People's Republic of China. In European states, the type of remedies, including the character and amount of damages, are determined on a case-by-case basis through factors such as the location where the illegal conduct caused damages. The enforcement of legal remedies can be difficult in international litigations as the law in one jurisdiction does not apply to another.