International Ship Arrest: A Practical Guide is not a textbook. Those who wish to find exposition on the law of arrest should look elsewhere. Nor is it a reference book in the conventional sense:it contains neither legislation nor precedents. The book has instead one specific function, and one only: its aim is to provide the “busy practitioner” with outline information on arrest procedures all over the world. McArdle obtained his information by sending a questionnaire to his many lawyer contacts throughout the world, and in order to write the book all he has done is to publish the answers. The questionnaire, which is set out at the front of the book, asks a range of questions about the evidential, documentary and procedural requirements for arresting and releasing a vessel. Security, cost and time considerations are all covered, as are detailed documentary matters, such as translation and the admissibility or otherwise of fax documents. The questions are almost exclusively procedural, however, there being little on the substantive grounds for arresting a vessel, nor indeed on whether to make an arrest is a desirable course of action.

It is not clear how many questionnaires were sent out, but at any rate responses were obtained from 123 jurisdictions, so virtually everywhere in the world is covered. Countries are set out in alphabetical order. Along with each response is included some general background on the jurisdiction concerned, for example, language, currency, time zones, public holidays, air connections and main port or ports. For some jurisdictions other information useful to the practitioner (for example, in the section on England and Wales, the usual registry hours) can also be found, but this depends on the extent of detail provided in the response to the individual questionnaire. McArdle also includes for each country the name, address and telephone number of his contact, who is invariably a local practising lawyer.

Because the same questionnaire was sent to all McArdle’s local contacts, he has ensured that there are no serious omissions in any of the responses, and that there is a high degree of uniformity in their style. The amount of detail varies considerably, however, Ethiopia’s and Iran’s four pages comparing, for example, with Gabon’s and Korea’s one and a half. Some answers for some jurisdictions are brief in the extreme, and a few rather unhelpful, e.g., that in Bahrain fax documents are “not usually” acceptable (without further elaboration) and that documents “that are sent by facsimile transmission are given limited validity by the Mexican courts” (again, without elaboration). In some jurisdictions there is apparently very little information available. In Macao, for example, “no court precedents of ship arrest can be traced, and therefore no information is available as to what will be accepted as good security”; and nor, for the same reason, is any information available on special documentation in that jurisdiction.

McArdle claims that his book is a guide which “can assist in quickly providing claimants with the broad requirements for an arrest in most countries of the world”. The book succeeds in doing this, but it must be stressed that the information provided is in outline only. Nobody could use this book, by itself, to effect an arrest. That sort of information is provided instead by the six books, covering major jurisdictions, in Lloyd’s Arrest of Ships series. Indeed, McArdle states:

One is left, therefore, with a very brief summary of arrest procedures throughout most of the world, and the names and addresses of useful contacts should an arrest actually be contemplated. No doubt the book will find a ready, if small market, but nevertheless I was left