Contemporary Auditing 10th Edition by Michael Knapp

Exercise 37

The Restatement of Torts is a legal compendium issued by the American Law Institute. This compendium is relied on by courts in many jurisdictions as the basis for legal rulings. Under the Restatement of Torts , courts have ruled that negligent auditors can be held liable to unknown third parties if those parties belonged to a known group of financial statement users who the auditors were aware would likely rely on the audited financial statements. If this legal principle had been invoked in the Hochfelder case, would the defrauded investors have been successful in pursuing a negligence claim against Ernst Ernst under the common law Why or why not