Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - FACTORING LAW AND PRACTICE
FACTORING LAW AND PRACTICE. F. R. Salinger. F.C.A. Sweet & Maxwell, London (1991) xxiv and 271 pp., plus 70 pp. Appendices and 16 pp. Index. Hardback £48.
As Professor Goode writes in his Foreword, the literature on this subject remains small. Indeed, so far as I am aware, this is the first monograph on the subject to be published in England since 1975 (Biscoe, The Law and Practice of Credit Factoring, Butterworths, London, 1975). Possibly the most significant legal development since then has been the 1988 UNIDROIT Convention on International Factoring, which is intended to remove some of the impediments to cross-border factoring created by national laws. The amount of space devoted in this volume to international factoring is perhaps one of the most significant differences between it and the earlier book. It should be noted, however, that the focus of the book is factoring as it is practised in the United Kingdom.
First of all, what is factoring? For the purposes of this book it is defined as follows:
The purchase of debts (other than debts incurred for goods or services purchased by a debtor for his personal, family or domestic use and debts payable on long terms or by instalments) for the purpose of providing finance, or relieving the seller from administrative tasks or from bad debts or for any two or all of such purposes.
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