PREFACE

The House of Lords' landmark decision in Hedley Byrne & Co Ltd v Heller & Partners Ltd marked its 50th anniversary in 2013. The case is one of the main landmarks of English private law in the twentieth century and has been greatly influential in shaping thinking in a number of Commonwealth jurisdictions.

This international collection of essays brings together leading experts from five of the world's most important common law jurisdictions (the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and Australia) to reappraise the case's implications from a number of complementary perspectives—historical, theoreti­cal, doctrinal and comparative. The volume critically explores modern develop­ments in the law of misstatements in each of the five jurisdictions; examines the meaning and influence of the concepts at its heart (‘voluntary assumptions of responsibility' and ‘reliance' ); explores the intersections between modern mis­statement liabilities in contract, tort, equity and under statute; and examines the way in which liabilities are now distributed between advisors and others respon­sible for financial losses under systems of ‘joint and several' and ‘proportionate' liability respectively. As well as making concrete suggestions for the better for­mulation of misstatement rules and remedies, it also canvasses debates about the respective roles of ‘rights' and ‘welfare' in tort law; about the respective boundaries of tort and contract; and about the appropriateness or otherwise of courts using tort as a mechanism for the regulation of economic and information markets.

Inspired by Hedley Byrne, the purpose of the collection is thus to reflect on the case's echoes, effects and analogues throughout the law of obligations and to pro­vide a platform for thinking about the ways in which liabilities for misstatement and pure economic loss should be modelled in the problematic conditions of the modern day. It makes a significant contribution to this enterprise.