Introduction
A persistent and practical problem in the Iranian adjudicatory process for claims of monetary damages arises from reliance on expert valuations that are not updated to reflect the erosion of monetary value between the date of expertise and the date of judgment. Expert reports frequently constitute the factual and technical backbone of court determinations about quantum; yet, where protracted proceedings and inflationary economies intervene, the nominal sums established by experts at an earlier date may no longer represent the victim’s real loss at the time the judgment is enforced. This divergence undermines the compensatory objective of private law — namely, the restoration of the injured party to the position they would have occupied had the obligation been performed — and risks producing unjust enrichment of defaulting obligors. The present study asks whether, and on what legal and doctrinal bases, an expert’s valuation in disputes concerning breach of financial obligations should be adjusted at the judgment stage in light of economic changes, and seeks normative and practical solutions to align judicial practice with principles of corrective justice and procedural fairness.
Methods
The inquiry adopts a doctrinal-interpretive and comparative methodology. Domestically, the analysis stages a hermeneutic reading of foundational norms of Iranian private law and procedural law, including doctrinal principles derived from Islamic jurisprudence (notably the rule against harm and the imperative of real compensation), statutory provisions such as the Note to Article 19 of the Law on Official Experts, the analogous procedural provisions addressing valuation at execution, and pertinent judicial practice and advisory opinions. The study then subjects these domestic materials to critical scrutiny in light of comparative experience, paying particular attention to recent legislative developments in French contract law (post-2016 reforms recognizing interest and adjustment mechanisms) as a paradigmatic example of legal accommodation to monetary depreciation and delayed enforcement. Scholarly literature on expectation interest, delay damages, and the interface between compensation and usury concerns is surveyed to test doctrinal coherence and to illuminate possible models for implementation that remain sensitive to Iran’s legal and religious constraints.
Results and Discussions
The research finds that adjustment of expert valuations at the judgment stage is defensible both doctrinally and practically. From a substantive vantage, Iranian law’s underlying commitment to realizing the claimant’s expectation interest and to effecting real compensation supports modification of out-dated expert figures: allowing a report’s nominal sum to govern an eventual judgment without correction is inconsistent with the compensatory function of damages and effectively subsidizes delinquency. Statutory signals corroborate this view. The Note to Article 19 of the Law on Official Experts, by limiting the unqualified validity of valuations to a six-month horizon where “current price” determinations are at issue, manifests legislative awareness that time devalues expert findings. Other procedural and civil norms that invoke the price at time of execution or require restitution in contemporaneous value similarly imply that temporal adjustment is not alien to the legal system. Nevertheless, judicial practice has tended toward formalism: courts often adopt the earlier expert report unamended, and some appellate authorities have rejected anticipatory claims to post-judgment adjustment, thereby creating doctrinal friction between statutory purpose and adjudicative routine. The inquiry further distinguishes between monetary (purely pecuniary) obligations and complex, non-monetary financial obligations. In monetary obligations, the study suggests that indexation to official inflation measures or other reliable economic indicators can produce a rapid, administrable correction of the expert sum without the need for repeated technical inquiry; this preserves expedition while safeguarding substantive redress. By contrast, obligations whose value is tethered to market-specific inputs (for example, construction contracts or deliveries of goods with volatile input costs) often require a substantive reassessment by a domain expert because general inflation indices may not capture discrete price movements in sectoral elements such as materials or labour. Procedural fairness considerations are decisive: whenever an adjustment would produce a materially different outcome — conceived here as a substantial percentage deviation or a change in the valuation method — the court must notify the parties and afford an opportunity to contest or supplement the new assessment in order to preserve adversarial rights and the principle of equality of arms. Comparative experience, notably French practice of attaching post-judgment interest and granting appellate courts discretionary power to order adjustment, demonstrates viable institutional designs that reconcile speedy enforcement with protection against depreciation. Finally, the study addresses doctrinal concerns about usury by arguing that properly structured corrective interest or indexation intended solely to restore purchasing power — and not to provide a premium for delay — can be reconciled with Islamic prohibitions, provided the remedy is framed as compensatory rather than punitive or lucratively interest-bearing.
Conclusion
In sum, the study concludes that failure to adjust expert valuations between the date of expertise and the date of judgment frustrates the core aims of compensation law and weakens the deterrent capacity of contractual remedies. A legally coherent and practically workable approach is to institutionalize adjustment as part of the judgment stage: for monetary obligations, by applying transparent, official indices to revalue expert amounts; for non-monetary, market-sensitive obligations, by ordering a targeted reassessment by qualified experts; and in all cases by ensuring that substantial adjustments trigger procedural protections so that parties may contest the new assessment. If judicial practice remains resistant, a calibrated legislative amendment that explicitly empowers courts to revise valuations at judgment (mirroring the Note to Article 19’s spirit and providing a six-month threshold and criteria for substantial change) would reconcile statutory law with equitable compensation, shore up public confidence in the justice system, and secure more faithful restitution of expectation interests in inflationary conditions.