INTRODUCTION
In a 2004 Current Legal Problems lecture, Professor Bridge conducted the fundamental ‘thought experiment’ of asking whether ‘if today we did not have an institution of innocent misrepresentation in contract law, would we want to invent it?’. Bridge himself was ‘far from sure that the answer would be in the affirmative’, arguing for the abolition of a doctrine ‘the need for [which had] been largely eclipsed by the development of express warranty’, and ‘the price [of which] in terms of the overall doctrine of contract law is [now] too great’. Bridge elsewhere argued that we should ‘extirpate’ rescission for innocent misrepresentation from the law of sales specifically. In this article, I will presume to offer support for Bridge’s arguments through an analysis of the part played in ‘the development of express warranty’ by two authorities which will be well known to every reader of this article: Oscar Chess v Williams and Dick Bentley Productions Ltd v Harold Smith (Motors) Ltd. These authorities brought about a major change of approach towards the classification of statements as innocent misrepresentations, and this has culminated in the innocent misrepresentation now playing no useful part in the law of contract …
€ (Westlaw)
David Campbell, ‘Oscar Chess, Dick Bentley and the abolition of innocent misrepresentation’ [2024] Journal of Business Law (1) 1-23.
Leave a Reply