Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
In the landmark case of OBG Ltd v Allan, Lord Nicholls asserted that, ‘[t]he facts of Lumley v Gye … are familiar to every law student’. I doubt whether this is true. But even if it is, it would be a fairly safe bet that very few law students would be able to describe with confidence exactly what Lumley established. Indeed, I would even be prepared to extend the wager in the direction of the majority of people who either teach or practice in the field of tort law for the simple reason that judicial and scholarly opinion is so notoriously divided, not just in relation to the putative rationale for inducing breach of contract, but also, more pertinently, in relation to whether Lumley instantiated a rule of accessory liability or a free-standing tort. True, in the course of his thoroughgoing review of the economic torts in OBG, Lord Hoffmann did repeatedly assert that inducing breach of contract is a rule of secondary (or accessory) liability. But he was also conspicuously inconsistent in the language that he used …

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John Murphy, ‘The Marex tort: a nascent but needless action’ (2025) 141 Law Quarterly Review (Apr) 225-245.