The 64th volume of the British Yearbook opens with the fifth in the series of articles by Thirlway surveying the law and procedure of the International Court of Justice from 1960–1989. As time passes, and as the ICJ continues to produce judgments in numbers above its historic averages, it is increasingly difficult to limit the scope of the series to the set dates. This is obviously so in the case of the current instalment, which commences the substantive examination of the Law of the Sea and focuses upon title to maritime spaces and its relationship to delimitation. This would have been seriously diminished in value without reference to the 1993 judgment of the court in the Greenland/Jan Mayen (Denmark v. Norway) case. Happily, it has been included, although one suspects time constraints might have prevented the judgment from thoroughly permeating the work as a whole. As is to be expected, the article is thought-provoking and, while not all will be comfortable with the distinction drawn between “an” equitable solution which might be achieved by the parties and which may or may not equate with “the” equitable solution brought about by the “correct” application of law, scholarship and sense shine through.

This is followed by a sensitive and sympathetic assessment of the life and work of Dr F. A. Mann by Collins, bearing eloquent testimony to the remarkable contribution that he made to both public and private international law. The landmark decisions with which he was involved, including the Barcelona Traction case, Carl Zeiss Stiftung v. Rayner & Keeler and Buttes Gas and Oil v. Hammer, are noted and the influence of his many writings is traced. Of particular interest is the part he played in influencing the outcome of Oppenheimer v. Cattermole before the House of Lords. This should be required reading for any who still doubt the significance of academic writing to the practice of law before the courts.

Crawford, reflecting the topic of his inaugural lecture as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge University, raises a number of disturbing thoughts in a short article entitled “Democracy and International Law”. He identifies a number of aspects of “classic” international law which pose problems for those who see international law as a vehicle through which to press the case for democratic governance and, while charting the tentative progress towards the establishment of such systems, highlights the not inconsiderable challenges to orthodoxy that it brings. This is a topic that is likely to be frequently revisited over the coming years.

A topic revisited in the current Yearbook is the jurisdiction of the ICJ under Art. 36(2) of its Statute. In “The Optional Clause revisited” Merrills returns to a subject he addressed in the Yearbook in 1979 and surveys the acceptances of, and reservations to, the “compulsory” jurisdiction during the intervening years. He concludes that, while the quantity of acceptances is more or less