What are the different sources of the law in England and Wales, and what are the common law rules which engage with an actionable misrepresentation?

Extract

[...] What are the different sources of the law in England and Wales, and what are the common law rules which engage with an actionable misrepresentation? Critically assess the different sources of the law in England and Wales. The two primary sources of law in England and Wales are legislation and legal precedent. Legislation, commonly referred to as statutes, are laws that have been enacted through Acts of Parliament. As the UK has a parliamentary sovereignty system, Acts of Parliament represent the supreme form of law-making in the country. [...]

[...] The Supreme Court sits at the apex of the court system as the final court of appeal. It has assumed the judicial functions of the House of Lords and is now the highest court in the UK for all cases. The Supreme Court is only strictly bound by its own previous decisions under the stare decisis principle. Through a system of binding precedent, consistency and predictability are achieved in the application of legal rules to new factual scenarios. Precedent provides certainty for litigants, lawyers and judges in how the law will be interpreted. [...]

[...] Only when all of these elements are clearly established will a court find that a party has committed an actionable misrepresentation for which they may be held legally and financially accountable. The common law has developed several well-established rules and principles that govern how courts evaluate claims of actionable misrepresentation. These rules help determine whether the key criteria of an actionable misrepresentation have been met in a particular case. One of the fundamental rules is that the misrepresentation must relate to an ascertainable fact, rather than a mere statement of opinion. The law recognizes that opinions are subjective, and that people are free to disagree on matters of personal judgment. [...]

[...] There must be unbroken causal link between the statement, the claimant's reliance, and the financial or other detriment they incurred. These common law rules help curtail opportunistic or trivial misrepresentation claims while still providing recourse for parties clearly misled into disadvantageous positions through another's intentional factual deception. By requiring proof of objective reliance, knowledge of falsity, proximate causation of harm, and other stringent criteria, the law balances protection of legitimate commercial interests with prevention of frivolous lawsuits over mere disagreements or non-actionable representations of opinion, belief, or immaterial puffery. [...]

[...] The claimant bears the burden of proving that they reasonably relied upon the representation in making their decision. It is not enough to simply allege that a representation was false - they must demonstrate that the specific misrepresentation materially influenced their choice to engage in the deal. Courts apply an objective standard of reasonableness here. The reliance must be evaluated as something a similarly situated reasonable person would have found plausible given the available information at the time of the agreement. [...]