Atiyah’s Sale of Goods is now such a well-established institution that it needs little introduction. Sensibly priced and published in paperback, its clear and readable exposition of the complex law in this area makes it an excellent text for students. More theoretical (and considerably shorter, and cheaper) than Benjamin on Sale of Goods (4th edn, 1992) it is an ideal companion to that book for practitioners.

Professor Adams’s confessed policy has been to carry out a “light editing job” as opposed to any substantial revision. The structure of the book is the same and many sections are hardly changed at all: even the sections dealing with the amendments effected by the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994 are remarkably little altered. This is for several reasons: first, Professor Atiyah dealt extensively with the Law Commission’s proposals which led to the 1994 Act in the previous edition; secondly, the old law still applies to contracts made before 3 January 1995 and so analysis of it will continue to be relevant to practitioners for some time to come; thirdly, it is important to view the changes in their historical context; fourthly, both Professor Adams and Professor Atiyah take the view that previous case law should be taken into account in the application of the new provisions. This is particularly so in the chapter covering the new s. 14(2), which replaces the implied condition of merchantable quality with one of satisfactory quality. Following the approach of the Court of Appeal in Rogers v. Parish (Scarborough) Ltd [1987] Q.B. 933, it could be argued that this standard is sufficiently defined in the Act to be applied by the courts in most cases without considering previous case law (see G. Howells, “The Modernization of Sales Law” [1995] LMCLQ 191). Professor Adams, and Professor Atiyah, on the other hand, view such general terms as “merchantable” and “satisfactory” as “somewhat vacuous in practice”, and likely to be replaced with concepts of reasonableness having substantial flexibility. Thus, they contend that previous case law plays an important role in the application of both the old and the new definitions, and virtually all the analysis of it that appeared in the 8th edition is included in the 9th edition.

As well as the Sale and Supply of Goods Act 1994, the new edition includes discussion of the Sale of Goods (Amendment) Act 1994 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1994 (S.I. 1994 No. 3159). While some of the changes brought about by these pieces of legislation are given a qualified welcome (for example, the restriction on the commercial buyer’s right to reject goods contained in the new s. 15A of the Sale of Goods Act), the general point is made that the