Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - BANKS, LIABILITY AND RISK (2ND EDITION)
BANKS, LIABILITY AND RISK (2nd Edition). Edited by R. Cranston, Cassel Professor of Commercial Law, London School of Economics. LLP, London (1995) xlix and 412 pp., plus 11 pp. Index. Hardback £58.
These are interesting books for banking and commercial lawyers; they examine developments which have widespread and increasing importance for banks and other institutions and for their advisers. They both follow on earlier books, but the pace of change in the law (and in the technology) has been so rapid that new editions are welcome.
Banks, Liability and Risk aims to examine the law in England and internationally of what has become known as “lender liability”—situations where lenders may be liable to borrowers, guarantors of borrowers, shareholders and others, including even other lenders. The key to the range of potential liability—and to its increasing importance—is the desire to find “deep pocket” defendants, for which lenders are the obvious candidates.
Each chapter considers the law of either a single jurisdiction or a cluster of similar ones. Professor Cranston warns readers in his introduction that liability tends to be a “collection of single
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