A generation ago, those of us toiling away at the jurisdictional end of the conflict of laws had the happy blessing of O’Malley & Layton’s European Civil Practice . The huge purple volume defined for itself and then filled the gap somewhere between the authoritative approach of Dicey & Morris , which tended to restrict itself to a laying down of the law in a restricted number of pages; the readable but rather concise and dating monographs of Hartley and Collins , neither of which progressed beyond a first edition; and Professor Kaye’s Big Red Book which, in its idiosyncratic way used just as many words as O’Malley & Layton but deployed them to construct a much smaller number of sentences. Since 1987 others have chipped in, and the result is that the practitioner and the library scholar is distinctly well served by English-language accounts of this subject. But what O’Malley & Layton had contributed was a reassurance that the authors had actually looked for and looked at the foreign material in what is, for most others, a series of closed books, and that they were putting forward views which therefore rested on broad and deep foundations. It did so in the format of a rigorous organizational structure which meant that, if you knew which Article of the Brussels Convention was in issue, you would have all the material relevant to it mentioned in the footnotes, so that it was a first-rate resource and guide to the sources. It offered a winning blend of unhurried explanation, for which the authors had been allowed as much space as they needed, leavened by some analytical prediction. And in the days before the internet it provided a useful collection of those Expert Reports, then not so easy to locate. And when one was encouraged to think that a book which looked so handsome just had to be reliable, one was not just judging a book by its cover.

Seventeen years after this first edition, Judge O’Malley has retired from the fray; Mr Layton has acquired a new co-editor (Hugh Mercer) and a team of assistants; and in 2004 the second edition appeared. That this review will appear nearly two years after its publication does not reflect—even if might have—the amount of time it took to read the book, but the utterly bizarre fact that the publisher regularly failed to allow review copies to leak into the wider world. The result was that news of the reappearance of the book spread, or did not spread, by word of mouth. The secret is now out. Anyone reading this and who practises in this area and who has not bought the book yet should go and buy it right now.

Layton & Mercer , as we must learn to call it, is formidably comprehensive. At its heart is an analysis, deployed Article by Article and phrase by phrase, of the Brussels Judgments Regulation, 44/2001, together with treatment of the Brussels and Lugano Conventions. Around the edges are explanations of English law and procedure on civil procedure, jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments; and a commentary on the other provisions of the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982, as these have been amended from time to time. The second volume—the book has divided itself into two—contains substantial accounts of material matters of national law and procedure from the perspective of the other Member and Contracting States, though excluding nine of the 10 States which acceded to membership of the EU in 2004; and reproduces the legislation and

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