The title Interests in Goods does not convey the range and diversity of subjects which this book treats. It is avowedly a collection of essays and surveys. They are contributed by 25 contributors, both practitioners and academics from universities country-wide, including the general editors. The contributions are learned, clearly written and embellished with references to English, Commonwealth and United States authority and academic writing. The results are generally both stimulating and instructive.

The work’s breadth is illustrated by the variety of types of property interest to which its second section (entitled “Forms of Property”) directs attention. The reader is invited to consider with a fresh eye the concept of property and the often unconscious, and sometimes questionable, use of property reasoning in different areas of the law. The diversity can also surprise. After the initial chapter on “Information as Property”, there follows “Attachment of Chattels to Land”. The contrast between conventional and more esoteric and controversial forms of property continues with chapters on “Proprietary Rights in Human Tissue”, followed by “Global Custody—a Tentative analysis of Property and Contract” dealing with custody of securities, and then “The Owner of a Work of Visual Art and the Artist: Potential Conflict of Interest”. The chapters on “Information as Property” and “Proprietary Rights in Human Tissue” are of particular interest.

At the work’s very start is a miscellaneous section headed “Specific Transactions and Relations”. The first essay, on “The Proprietary Effect of a Hire of Goods” by William Swadling of Queen Mary and Westfield College, sets the tone of high academic excellence followed by later contributions. There are then surveys of “Aircraft Mortgages” and “Ship Mortgages” and of “Title to Goods, Materials and Plant under Construction Contracts”, followed by a chapter on “The Title Obligations of the Seller of Goods” and finally a chapter on “Sub-bailment on Terms” by Andrew Bell of the University of Manchester. The last contribution deals with a subject of enormous commercial significance in the day-to-day regulation of rights and responsibilities arising out of the loss of or damage to goods in the possession of third parties with whom a plaintiff has no contractual relationship. Its quality is acknowledged by the work’s citation by Lord Goff in the Privy Council in The Pioneer Container [1994] 2 A.C. 324, 344. That case now provides an answer to many points discussed in this chapter—while leaving tantalizingly open a prospect that judicial radicalism may one day erode even the “strict principle of privity of contract … supported and enhanced by the doctrine of consideration” (at p. 335). For the time being, however, it is the voluntary assumption of possession of another person’s goods, giving rise to a bailment, that enables the law to moderate some of the rigours which would otherwise flow from that doctrine, by way of unrestricted exposure of a third party bailee to the ultimate owner. Retrenchment in recent years of the duty of care means that in practice this is also the central area where exposure would otherwise be felt. The Pioneer Container re-expresses at the highest level the value and relevance attaching in today’s legal conditions to academic analysis and exposition. The present work’s editors state with justification