If I own something of low market value but high subjective value (say a picture of my deceased grandmother) and someone steals/destroys it how should I be compensated?
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah
The question is misleading because every possible thing has a market value which is nonequal to its personal subjective value to any given person. The picture of your grandmother is an extreme case of this; however; the restitution you receive should be determined in the same way as any other. You should receive the restitution agreed upon by your respective representatives, the insurers of the property, or by a third party arbitrator.
That is a good point; I guess I could rephrase the question to ask about a situation where the distributions between the two value systems (market and personal) are vast (as in the picture example). Yet how do I prove what is valuable to me? How does a third party arbitrator decide on the value of such a picture? And in this case where restitution is a function of subjective valuation, wouldn’t there be a tendency to lie about personal value?
I assume you could take out an insurance claim for obscure articles you value and this would do well to prove such valuation, yet, is there any positive obligation to tell the trespasser that such an article is highly valuable and insured?
Your insurance claim would repay you in the event of theft, but it would prove nothing about what the criminal owes you in restitution. That should still be the responsibility of an arbitrator. Arbitrators whose judgements are more popular would outcompete arbitrators with less popular judgements, and in this way the law regarding situations like this would move toward standardization.