Conclusions

This chapter has demonstrated that the law of negligent misstatements causa­tive of financial loss has been poorly theorised by the corrective justice and rights theorists. They have failed to understand the way in which the assumption of responsibility concept was used in the Hedley Byrne case.^[1252] The four of their Lord­ships who commented upon the relationship between that concept and the concept of proximity arising from D onoghue v Stevenson quite clearly and unequivocally saw the former as a subset of the latter.

The chapter has also invoked the present writer's conception of proximity (being concerned with the factual links between the parties which create path­ways to harm) in order to identify the most important proximity factors that have been used to ground duties of care in cases of negligent misstatements causative of financial loss. These factors were explained to include advisor-client relationships, statement-maker skills or competences (or the holding-out of such), induce­ments to act, requests for advice or information, and the active dissemination of documents in circumstances where defendants know that claimants have particular purposes or interests in seeing them. The chapter also explained why it is incorrect to treat as proximity factors such things as knowledge of the likelihood of reliance, the formality of occasions on which advice is given, and reliance upon statements.