A “year book” commonly includes topical articles, notes on current developments and cases, as well as reviews of books. The present one contains these and more. The “and more” is headed “United Kingdom Materials on International Law”. Such materials have a particular significance in an international law year book because part of the process of ascertaining rules of customary international law requires identification of state practice. Evidence of that of the United Kingdom, and much more besides, is to be found in this section of the Year Book.

A case in which use was made in the House of Lords of such materials from an earlier volume of the British Year Book to assist in analysis of a problem having international elements was Arab Monetary Fund v. Hashim (No. 3) [1991] 2 A.C. 114, 163. There the status of an international banking organization was in issue, the organization having been created by a treaty to which the United Kingdom was not a party. The House of Lords latched on to a 1978 statement in a reply by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to a request for the advice on this very issue, a reply which had been given greater accessibility through being reproduced in the Year Book.

The 218 pages of materials in the present volume contain a wealth of matters ranging from items relevant to recognition of states and governments (in the sense of the issues in Republic of Somalia v. Woodhouse Drake [1993] Q.B. 54), through information on treaties and diplomatic privileges, to extracts from formal Letters and Notes on extraterritorial jurisdiction and substantial extracts from the First Memorandum filed by the U.K. Government (May 1990) in the Heathrow Airport User Charges Arbitration, U.S.A. v. U.K.

Some of these items link, as regards their subject-matter, with the substantial articles with which the volume opens. “Recognition of Governments: An Analysis of the New British Policy and Practice” covers a topic which in the current state of world affairs could throw up many legal problems. Similarly, “Crimes sans Frontières: Jurisdictional Problems in English Law” is of topical interest in the light of statutory developments and case law and of the reference to “accepted principles of international law” in the context of jurisdiction in Deutsche Schachtbau v. S.I.T. [1990] 1 A.C. 295 (365, per Lord Goff).

Articles from several volumes of the British Year Book have been cited in judgments of courts in the United Kingdom, including Dr F. A. Mann’s “Statutes and the Conflict of Laws” (1974) 46 BYIL 117. The present volume contains tributes to Dr Mann and Sir James Fawcett, among others. The sections of the Year Book on decisions in private international law and on human rights record developments in areas which are prominent among those of international law with which these two distinguished lawyers were particularly associated. Added to the extensive treatment of issues of public international law, this shows the sense in which the volume can be accurately described as a Year Book of “international” law.