It is an increasingly common practice to draw a distinction within commercial law between Commercial Law and Consumer Law, the former being recognized as a large residual category after the latter has been separately identified. The peculiarity of Consumer law is the regulation of the parties’ relationship other than by their own mutual agreement, freedom of contract being the particular, almost (one might be inclined to think) old-fashioned feature of Commercial law. Yet at the heart of one of the paradigm areas of freedom of contract there is a now long established and accepted scheme which remains as worthy of study as any more recent and more kaleidoscopically complex system of consumer protection or (more accurately) regulation, namely the Hague Rules.

Like other parts of the law of contractual regulation, the Hague Rules are part of a moving picture. Legislation commonly occurs against a background of evolving judicial principles of interpretation; it may well build on the existing law (the Hague Rules by no means signified a complete change from the prior common law, and internationally they are an acknowledged successor to the U.S. Harter Act 1893); it is itself subject to amendment, both overtly piecemeal (e.g., the Visby modifications) and less consciously so (even the feared Hamburg Rules can be seen as a progression from the foregoing law); and it must be re-evaluated in the light of new challenges (most obviously the move away from the dominance of the traditional bill of lading: cf. the U.K. Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1992, s. 1). Moreover, legislation deriving from clearly articulated and deliberately enacted proposals should be given proper effect by being interpreted in accord with such proposals. Of course, legitimately or not, the courts might produce a sensible and consistent body of supplementary case law regardless of the reformers’ pre-legislative ambitions. But this approach has given way in the U.K. to the House of Lords’ recent acceptance of the role of travaux préparatoires in interpreting Acts of Parliament. A fortiori should this be so where legislation is the municipal implementation of a convention formulated to establish a uniform regulatory scheme; for, absent a co-ordinating appellate tribunal such as the European Court of Justice, there is more scope for divergence from the original legislative intentions. One might legitimately prioritize the practical inconvenience, or even impossibility, of attempting to divine a clear and consistent legislative will resulting from a sometimes haphazard and incompletely co-ordinated legislative process, particularly where crude political compromise may lead to rules which are not only unprincipled and inconsistent but deliberately formed incompletely. Identifying conscious imprecision, however, is simply one means of divining the true interpretation of the pertinent rules, for which reliable assistance, especially in the case of international agreements, is essential.

It seems remarkable, therefore, that for such a frequently used and well known régime as the Hague Rules this assistance, the value of which was immediately acknowleged, has only recently emerged. These three volumes are prefaced by a 23-page historical introduction: a fuller version has been published elsewhere and, given that this set represents a comprehensive record of the background materials to the Hague Rules, might usefully have been included here. But that is less important than having the original materials (generally reproduced in their original published form and many of them not otherwise readily accessible) collected together in one place. Ironically, perhaps, given the international utility of the collection, it focuses on the Rules as such and their specific American enactment but, given the length of the present collection alone, the compiler can hardly be criticized for not having