Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
I am grateful for the invitation from the PNBA to deliver the Peter Taylor Memorial Address. Peter Taylor was a hugely respected judge. It is an honour to be asked to deliver this address in his memory.
I have chosen as my topic pure economic loss in the law of tort and the concept of assumption of responsibility. I find this a difficult and fascinating area of the law. It raises problems of conceptual coherence in the law of negligence. It also illustrates, from an historical perspective, how the common law has developed from a world governed by the forms of action into a world where the law is taken to reflect substantive principles of justice and a developed legal taxonomy reflecting legal rights and obligations which are justified in terms of the underlying interests of the parties, as they fall to be balanced against each other. But at the same time, it is a topic which shows how the common law always builds on what already exists …

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Philip Sales, ‘Pure economic loss and assumption of responsibility: the Peter Taylor Memorial Address for the Professional Negligence Bar Association 20 April 2023’ (2023) 39(3) Professional Negligence 113-127.