History and the demands of transnational commerce have conspired to ensure that admiralty is one of the most international and uniform areas of law. Paradoxically, however, most admiralty textbooks seem determinedly parochial in scope and approach (with some notable exceptions—Tetley’s International Maritime and Admiralty Law comes to mind). Derrington and Turner’s The Law and Practice of Admiralty Matters, co-authored by a leading Australian maritime law academic and an English barrister, provides a welcome comparative analysis of admiralty law. The text draws upon the jurisprudence and perspectives of the major Anglo-Common Law (or Common Law influenced) maritime jurisdictions of Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and South Africa, as well as the normal staple diet of English admiralty law. It is undoubtedly the richer for it. It seems to me that the comparative dimension is one of the major strengths of this work, particularly in those chapters where the comparative analysis is closely and carefully integrated into the general discussion. It also creates a point of difference from the leading English admiralty texts, Jackson’s Enforcement of Maritime Claims and Meeson’s Admiralty Jurisdiction and Practice.

The authors by and large follow the traditional structure of the admiralty law textbook, discussing the nature and scope of the modern admiralty action, maritime liens and (adopting the Australian terminology in the Admiralty Act 1988 (Cth)) proprietary maritime claims and general maritime claims. The second half of the book deals with admiralty procedure, limitation of liability for maritime claims, and arbitration.

Chapter 2, which traverses the current doctrinal landscape of admiralty law, includes a thought-provoking and sustained dissection and deprecation of Lord Steyn’s reasoning in The Indian Grace (No. 2) [1997] UKHL 40; [1998] AC 878; [1998] 1 Lloyd’s Rep 1. The authors’ analysis of this controversial decision is informed by a helpful consideration of New Zealand and South African perspectives (the Australian Federal Court’s refusal to follow The Indian Grace in the important decision of Comandate Marine Corp v. Pan Australia Shipping Pty Ltd (The Comandate) [2006] FCA FC 192; [2008] 1 Lloyd’s Rep 119 would unfortunately have been handed down too late to have been included in the chapter). Given the conceptual nature of this chapter, however, one might have expected the contrary views of those commentators who do not regard Lord Steyn’s demolition of traditional admiralty doctrine in The Indian Grace as heretical to have been afforded more air-play.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 discuss proprietary maritime claims, maritime liens and general maritime claims in turn. I must confess that I found the separate characterization of statutory rights of action in rem in respect of proprietary maritime claims from other statutory rights of action in rem, and their discussion ahead of maritime liens, slightly jarring and ahistorical. I have always regarded maritime liens as the conceptual core of “real” admiralty jurisdiction—a view which would perhaps be more consistent with the authors’ rejection of Lord Steyn’s extreme proceduralism in The Indian Grace. But the re-ordering of the discussion of the key components of in rem admiralty jurisdiction