Professor Treitel’s The Law of Contract has not only been the guide of countless students and practitioners but is now the work on the subject for which judicial hands are seen to reach when the judicial mind is wanting help. His writings carry unique weight in the field of contract law. In the Preface to Remedies for Breach of Contract: a Comparative Account he explains, with characteristic modesty, that this new work grew out of a chapter he contributed in 1972 to the International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law. It is, he says, “intended to present a comparative account of the principal legal remedies available to the victim of a breach of contract: specific enforcement, compensation, refusal to perform and termination”. The chapter was a sapling which has grown into a mighty oak. This book is one of those genuine, original works of scholarship of which only one or two are seen in a generation.

Stated very simply, Remedies for Breach of Contract: a Comparative Account is a study of the differing approaches of the civil law and the common law to various problems connected with breach of contract. But to describe it thus is like describing War and Peace as a tale about what a few Russian aristocrats did during the Napoleonic wars: the truth, nothing but the truth, but far, far from the whole truth. Using, he says, principally German and French law to illustrate the approach of the civil law and English and American law to illustrate the approach of the common law, Professor Treitel examines in detail the concepts of fault (including strict liability), of “enforced liability” (the civil law process by which the innocent party receives the substance of what he bargained for, rather than monetary compensation—the common law order for specific performance is far narrower but a form of enforced liability), of giving substitutionary relief by way of monetary compensation (the normal common law remedy of damages, in civil law in theory but less in practice limited in its application), of damages for different types of default (including delay, non-performance and defective performance, and the need to give a notice of default), of methods of limiting damages (including foreseeability, causation and mitigation), of payments stipulated for by the contract (including penalty clauses, clauses limiting the quantum of damages, deposits and part payments), of defences to refusal to perform (including the classification of contracts and the different types of “condition”) and of termination of the contract (including the seriousness of the breach, anticipatory breach, options to terminate and the effects of termination).

As will be apparent from the above headings, the range of topics considered is massive. There are, of course, parts of contract law not covered but after 409 pages of text the reader will have covered a vast amount of ground. To explain the concepts of civil law to a common lawyer is a notoriously difficult task but Professor Treitel explains them in a way in which every common lawyer can follow throughout. There is no reason to believe that a civil lawyer would find the explanation of the common law concepts any less straightforward.

Like War and Peace this book can be read at many levels and for many purposes. For the common lawyer it will provide an explanation of many civil law concepts, some of them of great importance. This understanding is essential to the English lawyer venturing into the legal systems of most other members of the European Community. It will also enable him or her properly to understand a Convention based purely on the civil law and one, such as the Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, which uses both civil and common law concepts. References to the Vienna Convention are made throughout the