The law of misrepresentation has long posed problems for those writers who categorize legal obligations into neat conceptual packages. Thus, the leading works on contract and tort deal fully with the aspect of misrepresentation with which the text is primarily concerned; they then tend, in order “to give a fuller picture”, to examine the wider role played by the concept only cursorily. The result has been erroneously to suggest a clarity and simplicity which the law does not possess and so, at least for those students who learn tort and contract separately, has reinforced the view that contract is contract and tort is tort and never the twain shall meet.

The trend in recent years (academically, if not judicially) has been to see the law of obligations in wider terms and to explore critically the similarities and differences between causes of action in tort and in contract. To the extent then that Allen takes misrepresentation and attempts to see it as a distinct topic which transgresses the boundaries between tort and contract (and even at points restitution, although not acknowledged as such—see, for example, the author’s analysis of A von C. C. v. Howlett [1983] 1 W.L.R. 605, at pp. 156–157) the work is fully within the contemporary mode.

Allen’s strategy is to examine “in separate chapters the various strands that go to make up the general law of misrepresentation, reserving a more thematic analysis for an introductory chapter and a concluding chapter”. His aim is to provide “a clear exposition and analysis”. However, the purpose of attempting such an analysis must be to do more than simply reassemble the chapters of books on contract and tort into one volume and then leave it to the reader to conclude as to whether or not there is a coherent principle. The author intends better things but a disappointing feature of Allen’s work is the heavy reliance on exposition at the expense of the thematic analysis he promised in his Preface. To the latter only two short chapters are devoted, and throughout the rest of the work the emphasis is on a detailed examination of the case law. This is a pity because, in a work of this nature, it is the attempts to draw themes from the divergent strands of liability which are most interesting and Allen is at his best when he seeks to do so.

In Chapter 1, the author offers a brief insight into the origins of the action for misrepresen