Only the occasional, more interesting, London arbitration may be summarized in Lloyd’s Maritime Law Newsletter, in a “sanitized” form, with all details that might enable the identification of any of the parties or the arbitrators removed. In contrast, the Society of Maritime Arbitrators in New York publishes unexpurgated copies of almost all its members’ awards—unexpurgated, that is, save for the arbitrators’ fees, which do not appear!

The awards so published are numbered, and the volume under review serves as an index to Nos 2625 to 3105 inclusive. These were issued between March 1989 and September 1994, suggesting something like 88 awards being made on average each year. That may be compared with an average of around 400 per year in London: a figure which itself suggests that the task of publishing London awards would be a formidable one.

The title of the work does its contents a disservice, for in fact it covers not only SMA Awards, but also maritime cases reported in the major American law reports, as well as those which appear in the Lloyd’s Newsletter, Lloyd’s List, Fairplay, the LOF Digest, this Quarterly and other sources, including papers given at the International Congress of Maritime Arbitrators. There are also, of course, references to cases appearing in Lloyd’s Law Reports, although those Reports are not referred to in the introductory explanatory note. Strangely, citations from them are shown as “Ll.L.Rep.”, a formulation which ceased to be employed in 1951.

The first part of the book is a Serial Index. This lists in numerical order the awards dealt with elsewhere, gives their dates and shows the names of the parties and ships involved. There follows a Party Index and a Ship Index, listing the parties and ships involved in the various arbitrations, and the awards with which they were involved. Some of the names are also familiar to those practising in London, while a couple of those that appear more frequently are clearly not only committed to New York arbitration, but also to using it a great deal.