There is a growing trend for publishers to offer “all you need to know” books on a particular practitioner topic. Take in this instance the law of personal injuries, and in particular those personal injury claims which have an overseas component to them. The practitioner who wishes to know whether the English courts do or do not have jurisdiction, will or will not apply English domestic law to the claim, would or would not recognise and enforce a foreign judgment, may look for the answer in Dicey, Morris & Collins: The Conflict of Laws. If he does so, he will find a comprehensive account of the rules, not bounded by the law and practice of personal injuries, which he will then have to apply and maybe adapt to the particular case with which he is concerned. Many’s the slip, though, so he may instead prefer to consult a book which is written for personal injury lawyers as its target readership, in which the same material will have been cut and shaped so that it speaks to personal injury lawyers, and says no more than is needed to set out the private international law of personal injury. Each approach is a legitimate one, but they are very different. A reviewer must therefore declare his hand. A private international lawyer may be tempted to find such an account bounded by the law and practice of personal injuries as short on detail, deceptive in its appearance of doctrinal clarity, and just not sufficiently interested in the difficulties to offer anything new. A personal injury lawyer may—it is just a guess—prefer to think that all the unnecessary material has been eliminated and that a book which has the same focus as he has is the right tool for the job. This reviewer falls into the former category, and those who do not consider this to represent the view from their vantage point should look away now.

For the general private international lawyer, the trouble is that much of the jurisdictional material contained in the various Brussels and Lugano instruments, and in the general common law, applies to personal injury claims and claimants as it does to everyone else. It follows that, for example, the complexity of working out for jurisdictional purposes exactly where damage occurred (Brussels I Regulation, art 5(3)) or was sustained (Ground (9) of para 3.1 of Practice Direction 6B to the Civil Procedure Rules) is as likely to crop up in a personal injury claim as in any other. It follows that the uncertainties of how these rules apply in troublesome or untidy cases are just as great in personal injury matters as elsewhere; and the material really cannot be compressed. Even the simple-seeming “‘look out!’ Splat” cases may be more complex than they seem. Consider the jurisdictional issues as they may apply when claims are brought by third parties complaining of their nervous shock, or bereavement, or loss of dependency when the primary victim is killed. Which person is the one whose damage counts for jurisdictional purposes? Which part of the sad chronology or geography of loss is the manifestation of damage which counts? Then consider claims by the victim’s estate, or claims by the victim whose condition has deteriorated since he was injured elsewhere, thus prompting him to sue again, as for example French law allows (it is odd that Henderson v. Jaouen [2002] 1 WLR 2791, where this particular aspect of person injury was dealt with, is not mentioned): all these and more can give rise to formidable jurisdictional problems. It is not clear that these can

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