Template:Warrantydescription

A warranty is a statement of a present or historical fact made as a term of a contract. If a warrantor breaches its warranty the injured party might claim damages for the breach of contract and sue for damages, but cannot rescind it altogether. To set aside the contract as if it never happened — to void it, ab initio — you would need to prove a misrepresentation from someone before the contract, that induced you to enter it. Purists would say that a warranty is no more suitable for a statement of future fact than is a representation — if, epistemologically, a “future fact” is even a thing, and those same purists would say it is not — for who knows what the future brings? The common law is no hard determinist; the golden thread of precedent looks backward, not forward; the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may yet pin us to a different hill. If the future is a soufflé, it is not so much that it hasn’t yet risen, but that the jurists who might be eating it have not yet decided whether they’re even going to that restaurant, and nor do they know whether it even has soufflé on the menu in the first place.

But, as ever, the Americans seem to have a different, and confused, idea about what representations and warranties are. This is ably, if a little laboriously, explained by the author of A Manual of Style For the Drafting of Contracts. Across the ditch they see the representation to be a statement of a past fact in a contract for which a party assumes responsibility, whereas a warranty is an equivalent statement of future fact — apparently the Americans have more truck with determinism than we do. Though apparently attested to by no less august an institution than the American Bar Association this seems wrong, even in the Land of the Shining Beacon on the Hill, and certainly under English law, as a matter of common sense. Warranties and representations, surely, both address matters of existing or historical fact; assurances as to what will come about in the hereafter — which, as Criswell would tell you, are the meaty ones, for the future is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives — are called “promises”.