This book is the first in a series of essay collections on defences in private law. It addresses defences to liability arising in tort. The essays range from those adopting a primarily doctrinal approach to others that examine the law from a more theoretical or historical perspective. Some essays focus on individual defences, while some are concerned with the links between defences, or with how defences relate to the structure of tort law as a whole. A number of the essays also draw upon concepts and literature that have been developed mainly in relation to the criminal law, and consider their application to tort law. The essays make several original contributions to this complex, important but neglected field of academic enquiry.

2013 was the 50th anniversary of the House of Lords' landmark decision in Hedley Byrne v Heller. This international collection of essays brings together leading experts from five of the most important jurisdictions in which the case has been received (the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and Australia) to reappraise its implications from a number of complementary perspectives-historical, theoretical, conceptual, doctrinal and comparative. It explores modern developments in the law of misstatement in each of the jurisdictions; examines the case's profound effects on the conceptual apparatus of the law of negligence more generally; explores the intersections between misstatement liabilities in contract, tort, equity and under statutory consumer protection provisions; and critically assesses the ways in which advisor liabilities have come to be limited and distributed under systems of 'joint and several' and 'proportionate' liability respectively. Inspired by Hedley Byrne, the purpose of the collection is to reflect on the case's echoes, effects and analogues throughout the private law and to provide a platform for thinking about the ways in which liabilities for misstatement and pure economic loss should be modelled in the modern day.

The principal objective of this book is simple: to provide a timely and effective means of navigating the current maze of case law on causation, in order that the solutions to causal problems might more easily be reached and the law relating to them more easily understood. The need for this has been increasingly evident in recent judgments dealing with causal issues: in particular, it seems to be ever harder to distinguish between the different 'categories' of causation and, consequently, to identify the legal test to be applied on any given set of facts. Causation in Negligence will make such identification easier, both by clarifying the parameters of each category and mapping the current key cases accordingly, and by providing one basic means of analysis which will make the resolution of even the thorniest of causal issues a straightforward process. The causal inquiry in negligence seems to have become a highly complicated and confused area of the law. As this book demonstrates, this is unnecessary and easily remedied.