Professor Smith’s Law of Contract, which is a new book in Sweet and Maxwell’s “Fundamental Principles of Law” series, and Professor Treitel’s Outline, now in its fourth edition, appear to be aimed at broadly the same market: that is to say, the need for introductory works intended to provide an overview of the subject for beginners and non-specialists (in the case of Treitel the latter are expressly mentioned in the Preface). For all that, it is difficult to conceive of two more different approaches to the allotted task.

The approach of Smith is to focus pre-eminently on the cases. As the author states in the Preface, there is “a close relationship” between this book and the Casebook on Contract which resulted from a collaboration between the author and the late Professor J. A. C. Thomas. In the present work the facts of cases are set out at length in the text and the effect, especially given the author’s attractive prose style, is to provide a highly readable summary of many of the familiar and much-loved contract cases as well as a number of the less well-known ones. Accordingly, the book has far more of what could be termed “human interest” than is usual in works on this branch of the law. The difficulty with this approach, however, particularly since cases inevitably tend to raise difficult issues where the law is uncertain, is that it risks basic rules and principles not emerging with the clarity which is desirable and, it is submitted, possible. A reader of Smith without previous knowledge of the law of contract would certainly gain the impression that it is a most enjoyable subject, and that is clearly a valuable achievement in itself. What is more open to question is whether he or she would simultaneously acquire an appreciation of the remarkable extent to which the multitude of cases has produced a body of doctrine with some degree of pattern and coherence.

Treitel is a very different type of book. It is a much longer and more detailed work than Smith and inevitably bears some similarity to the author’s own major textbook on Contract. It is also a far more demanding book than Smith; its aim is to state the law rather than to expound the cases and, as it were, leave the law to emerge from them. Although the facts of cases are set out in the text of Treitel when such treatment is appropriate, the basic method adopted is the conventional one of propositions in the text and authorities in the footnotes. The difficulty which beginners could have with Treitel is not that the basic principles are not clearly stated as such—they are—but rather that a level of comprehensiveness is aimed at which is apt to obscure those principles in detailed exposition of the many exceptions.

Needless to say, given the distinction of their authors, Smith and Treitel are, in their different ways, both excellent books. What is questionable is whether their most appropriate use is