It is quite remarkable to the reviewer that this text, the leading authoritative United States practitioner work on the law of carriage and transportation, seems to be almost unknown in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth to such an extent that it is on the shelves of none of the leading law libraries nor, the reviewer suspects, in many shipping and marine insurance solicitors’ offices. This is a sad omission as more and more academics search for comparative American material and a growing number of practitioners become involved in litigation involving American law on a transatlantic basis.

The present main text of Sorkin is up to date to 1986 and more modern material will be found in the supplements that are issued twice yearly. The great merit of this three-volume looseleaf work is that it is entirely multimodal and comparative in its approach. Thus, most chapters include a survey of not only American domestic law but of, for example, the Hague Rules, the Hague-Visby Rules, the Hamburg Rules, the Warsaw Convention, the Hague Protocol, the CMR Convention, COTIF/CIM etc., not to mention Incoterms, freight forwarders, the problems of containerization, the TCM Convention and a wealth of allied material plus a huge number of standard forms, contracts and relevant domestic and international legislation.

According to the publishers, the work is currently being reorganized and will, in the future, be issued in four volumes. Such a reorganization appears timely as currently Chapters 15–19, 30 and 33–39 are “reserved” and the excellent selection of forms, including much legislation, is to be found in Volume Two but some other legislation in the “Appen-