Reflections on partial-truths, supervening falsification, and pre-contractual misrepresentation

Examines the assumptions and beliefs on the part of contracting parties when deciding whether to enter into a proposed transaction. Explores the question of whether, on ordinary legal principles, an unknown and unsuspected adverse change in the facts between the time when the facts were originally represented and the moment when they induced the representee to conclude a contract on the strength of them is tantamount to innocent misrepresentation on the part of the ignorant representor who, quite truthfully at the time, asserted the subsequently falsified facts. Ponders whether, on ordinary legal principles, an unknown and unsuspected partial-truth is tantamount to innocent misrepresentation on the part of the representor who unwittingly made the fragmentary, hence misleading statement. Asserts that the answers to both questions are interesting and important not merely because they appear not yet to have been unambiguously determined in the courts of major Anglo-Common Law legal systems, but also because the Contractual Remedies Act 1979, which governs the jural effects of causative pre-contractual misrepresentations in NZ, assumes and absorbs the ruling common law conception of 'actionable misrepresentation'