Economic Torts and Economic Wrongs. Edited by John Eldridge, Michael Douglas and Claudia Carr. [Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2021. xiv + 344 pp. Hardback £85.00. ISBN 978-1-50993-475-1.]

Abstract

Writing extrajudicially, just a few years after delivering his leading speech in OBG Ltd. v Allan [2008] 1 A.C. 1, Lord Hoffmann suggested that, in the wake of that decision it was now fair to say that “the economic torts have run their course”. But despite their Lordships’ best endeavours in OBG to render the economic torts an area of interest to legal historians alone, cases involving these torts have continued to trouble courts all over the Commonwealth. Accordingly, in spite of what Lord Hoffmann hoped for in the wake of OBG, there is still a good deal of life left in these torts; and they continue to pose puzzles a-plenty. Against this background, a new book dealing with these actions was always destined to be eye-catching, especially when one bears in mind that the economic torts have been largely overlooked by most torts scholars. Furthermore, an especially attractive feature of this book is that it offers a collection of essays that is properly representative of the makeup of the private law community: there is none of the familiar dominance of contributions from male scholars based in England and Wales. However, as Shakespeare warned us several centuries ago, “all that glisters is not gold”. And that, I am afraid, is my overwhelming view of Economic Torts and Economic Wrongs. To be clear: the book is by no means a disaster. It comprises a collection of essays written by academics and practitioners located in various different jurisdictions and it undoubtedly contains some very worthwhile contributions. The problem, however, is that these are outnumbered by others that, for all their novelty, seem somehow to be misplaced. Before addressing the particular merits of some of the key essays in this volume, I think it is worth flagging up from the start what I take to be a serious omission in the editors’ introductory chapter. For this, instead of supplying a road map to the essays that follow, and a brief account of the arguments they advance, provides the reader with, in essence, a very swift (and therefore not very detailed) account of the way the economic torts have developed over the last century or so. Reference is made to a number of the landmark cases, and this is all well and good. But the reader is offered no guide to the particular conception of “economic torts” adopted by the editors. This is a great pity because, without such a guide, it is hard to fathom why quite a few of the essays that appear in this book should be thought to belong here. For all that there is well-known disagreement around the margins about just which torts comprise this particular family of actions, most torts scholars would consider some of the essays in this book as being fish out of water. There is, for example, an essay on defamation; and there are two on private nuisance. There is an essay concerned with “an award of equitable compensation against a defaulting fiduciary” (p. 232) and a related one entitled “Misfeasance by Directors”. There is also a contribution dealing with lawful act duress (which many readers would doubtless consider a topic associated with contract, not tort, law). True: some of the authors responsible for these far-from-obvious inclusions offer explanations of why they think their essays belong in this volume – a book that the editors repeatedly describe in their “Introduction” as being about the economic torts. But this only reinforces the case for their provision (and preferably defence) of a particular conception of “the economic torts”. For them merely to assert (but not unpack) the claim that “‘the economic torts’ is a wider and more diverse legal category than has heretofore been acknowledged” (p. 7) is plainly not enough. Cambridge Law Journal, 82(1), March 2023, pp. 174–177 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge doi:10.1017/S0008197323000028