These 12 essays have been your reviewer’s constant companion for about a year, in two hemispheres and many lands, so it is not premature to give some account of them. In a recent book review Tony Weir, himself a distinguished Festschrift contributor (see his imaginative contribution to the first compilation in celebration of the late Professor John Fleming), identified as one of the current banes of academic life “Festschriften, … which normally pressurise contributors with nothing particular to say into writing pieces which then go irretrievably into a volume coherent only through thread and glue”. Judged by this standard an habitual reviewer of such miscellanea must represent even greater depths of unwanted banality. Nonetheless, from the Grub Street of legal writing a few disjointed comments must be strung together.

One useful function that a Festschrift contribution may perform is that of providing an introductory aperçu of a field in which the contributor is expert. The piece may not aspire to the originality or constructiveness usually aimed at in a law review article, yet it may have substantial value as an orientation course for non-specialist readers. Several of the present essays fall into this category. Thus Professor Peter Ellinger reviews the impact on banking law of computerisation and multi-national banks; Francis G. Jacobs examines the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice on the barriers to a single market flowing from national intellectual property rights; and the two editors of the book, Professor Eva Lomnicka and Professor Robin Morse, expound respectively two subjects which illustrate the inadequacy of the common law to give reasonable protection to consumers, and the consequent need for statutory intervention and international Conventions. Their fields are the conferment on consumers of rights against lenders who have financed transactions, as well as against the dealers (connected lender liability) and consumer protection in contracts with an international element (choice of law clauses and the like).

The longest essay, 23 pages, has the longest title, “Termination for Breach of Contract in C.I.F. Contracts Under the Vienna Convention and English Law: Is There a Substantial Difference?” by Alastair C. L. Mullis. While the title is nothing if not self-explanatory, the essay goes further in its plea that, even if the Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods were to be ratified by the United Kingdom, incorporation should not extend to international commodity trading. The argument is that this would disturb 100 years of case law: perhaps a rather insular point of view.

Another useful function of a Festschrift may be to give authors or editors of standard works space to deal more fully than in their texts with corners of their subjects. Such contributions are crumbs from the table of leading scholars. So here we have the benefit of authoritative pieces from two senior writers, Professor Francis Reynolds on “The Factor’s and Auctioneer’s Contracts” and Emeritus Professor Sir John Smith on “Anticipatory Breach of Contract”. Francis Reynolds favours what he calls a synthesisation of the principles of agency before turning back to detailed discriminations: which he must perceive to be a more practicable approach than is apparent at first