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Memoir of the Life of the Honorable William Blowers Bliss - Page 36

In Freeman vs Morton in the same volume at p. 340 will be found a thorough discussion of the rights of tenants in Common—in itself a valuable treatise on that very important branch of the law.

Hill vs Fraser, in the same book, p. 294, presents an admirable opinion on the right of a contractor to damages, where a false, though bona fide representation had been made to the contractor. "The plan," he says, "does as has been already stated most certainly exhibit and represent that beneath the water there was a substratum into which the piles could be driven, and the specification required that the work should be performed by driving piles into this substratum, and the contract was made to carry out this work. The existence of this substratum is thus an essential ingredient of it,—without it not only would the contract not have been made but the work could not have been done, and the Crown would have stipulated for an impracticable, and impossible performance. Now I must confess that under such a contract, I incline to the opinion that there is an implied warranty on the part of the Crown that such a substratum was there. I must not be understood to say that any mere representation made bona fide by one party to another by which he has been induced to enter into a contract can amount to a warranty, for that would be holding that misrepresentation without fraud would give a right of action in the very face of the authorities. I have cited to the contrary. But the distinction appears to me to be between the representation which precedes, and induces the contract and the representation embodied and forming part of the contract itself. And I cannot but think that whatever is represented by one party in a contract of so essential a nature that the very contract if founded upon it, arid cannot be carried into effect without it, amounts to a warranty of the matter as represented, and this appears to me to be the case under the first agreement."

I might continue to cite passages from many other of his judgments, but this is wholly unnecessary. These examples

 

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