The Clarendon Law series has a reputation for producing concise and highly readable texts across a range of areas of law. Adrian Briggs’ contribution to this series exemplifies why this reputation is well deserved. The book manages to cover all the major areas of the subject (jurisdiction, choice of law in contract and tort) and several areas located outside the core of many academic syllabuses (choice of law in equity and restitution, family law, corporations and insolvency). The focus of the book is on jurisdictional issues, and this balance is an early indication of Mr Briggs’ attention to the practical relevance of the subject. In addition to influencing the structure of the book as a whole, this practical style pervades each chapter: the flowchart-like methodology for cases involving the Brussels Judgments Regulation greatly aids the digestion of this dense instrument. This practical approach is also apparent in some of the content: the extremely brief mention of choice of law theories, such as interest analysis, springs to mind, but it would be unfair to criticize this absence in such a concise work, which covers vast amounts of ground elsewhere and in which further readings are indicated in the footnotes. If it is possible to quibble with the space afforded to any particular issue, it may be said that the two pages allocated to ‘‘New Technologies and the Conflict of Laws’’ is unduly short for a dedicated section (especially one without further reading listed in the footnotes) and might either have been expanded or its content diffused throughout the main body of the text. It is also unfortunate—though no fault of Mr Briggs—that the book was published before the House of Lords’ decision in Turner v. Grovit [2001] UKHL 65; [2002] 1 WLR 107, and so the discussion of anti-suit injunctions is perhaps a little modest. These comments ought to be kept in perspective, however; the book covers a great deal of ground, often in surprising detail for such a small book (for example, there are numerous references to pertinent Commonwealth decisions) and more comprehensive treatment can be found in the practitioner works.

Much of the theoretical discussion is located in a separate chapter at the start of the book. This section works very well: it weaves together many of the more complex topics (such as the incidental question) in an extremely lucid discussion. In some areas this is particularly helpful, such as where Mr Briggs puts forward his novel ideas concerning renvoi and the approach to revenue and penal laws. These ideas help to integrate into the mainstream of the subject topics that sometimes seem to have no natural home, and this is assisted by Mr Briggs’ creation of a separate chapter dedicated to ‘‘The Role of the Lex Fori’’. This section covers many of the areas that are notoriously daunting for students, yet they are explained crisply and incorporated into the text easily. The book contains several handfuls of similarly novel approaches to various areas of the subject (in addition to those mentioned above, the discussion of choice of law in equity and restitution is interesting). Whether one accepts their substantive content matters very little; their presence is ideally suited to such a concise work and ought to stimulate interest in novices and further reflection in more experienced lawyers. Indeed, in the latter group the practitioner ought to be able to grasp the essence of the

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