This is yet another environmental law book published by Cameron May, but is one of the few of their publications which I have read which I feel gives the reader good value for money. The author has a very fluid, thought provoking style of writing, which is aided by his willingness to comment upon what he is writing about (many Cameron May books are lacking in the analysis department). However, some of his comments are unsupportable, such as his statement on p. 82 that injunctions are increasingly being used prior to the start-up of new plants to delay these new plants. The THORP litigation by Greenpeace, in which the group would have had to have given a cross undertaking of £2,000,000 per week in order to be granted interim relief, shows that economic considerations make it very difficult for the injunction to be used in this way.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of some of the issues covered by the book. It sets the scene by discussing the more developed North American environmental liability insurance market, including the very liberal interpretation by courts of clauses in policies which seem to run counter to the clear intention of the underwriters to draft watertight limitations on their coverage. It also, inter alia, discusses some solutions to the issue of retrospective strict tortious liability, which has become an important issue in Europe following the publication of the Commission’s Green Paper “Remedying Environmental Damage”. In discussing the solutions, the author perhaps relies too much on the United States Superfund model (see p. 29) but does highlight the political difficulties of getting any private sector involvement in historic pollution clean-ups based upon any notion of collective responsibility of industrial sectors. Retrospective tortious liability also of course has the ability to increase the exposure of insurers.

The Green Paper was not the only document in the 1990s at the pan-European level which threatened to expand tortious liability to cover more environmental incidents. The draft directive on civil liability for damage caused by waste and the Council of Europe Convention on Environmental Damage (the Lugano Convention) both aimed to do this. In Chapter 4 these developments, plus those within individual European nations, are looked at to identify possible implications for insurers. It is written on a subject-by-subject rather than an article-by-article basis, and all the major issues involved in expanded civil liability (strict liability, defences, types of damage, limitations, causation and standing) are dealt with. A very comprehensive account of these issues is given here, indeed it is one of the best accounts of the issues which I have come across.

Current tortious liability is given significant coverage in Chapter 2 “General Insurance Law”, which I feel is a little unnecessary given that other tomes deal in detail with this area, and the discussion of the English law is in terms of general tort without showing its significance to insurance policies. The chapter also introduces some key concepts in insurance policies such as “injury” and “legal liability”, with more detailed coverage left to Chapter 7. Chapter 3, “An Overview of Environmental Issues Affecting Insurance Law”, deals with a rag-bag of issues such as the two basic types of pollution policies available (Environmental Impairment Liability Insurance [liability for injuries to third parties] and Own-Site Clean-up Insurance), which are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. It further discusses how businesses may be disrupted by challenges to licences (an unnecessary discussion as the author does not show how this can be insured against), and deals with contaminated land and convictions. A feeling persists that, despite some very interesting points made in Chapters 1 to 3, the author needed to reorganize or indeed drop some material to make the book’s structure more logical.