This second edition of Dr Hazelwood’s book on the P. & I. Clubs is very timely. Since the first edition in 1989, his subject has been perceived as being of increasing importance. This is for two main reasons.

First, the cost to shipowners of their liabilities to others has risen sharply. Consequently the premiums payable for insurance against these risks, usually in the form of calls to P. & I. Clubs, have become serious money. This has attracted the attention of brokers, financiers and potential competitors. It has also created new tensions between the different types of shipowners who have until recently co-existed happily within a single Club; in an attempt to maintain mutuality the P. & I. Clubs have recently been obliged to borrow a device from the War Risks Clubs and impose additional per voyage premiums upon tankers trading into United States waters with crude oil cargoes, an admission that their traditional underwriting systems are no longer capable of dealing with the new high level of claims and calls. In this age of liability the cost of insuring against such risks may be expected to rise still further, both in absolute terms and relative to the cost of insuring property. Thus attention will increasingly be focused on how the Clubs operate, especially in terms of relative fairness between different groups of their shipowner members and in terms of the size of reserves that a Club now needs in order to be able to promise reasonable stability of supplementary calls (for the largest, even one billion dollars may not be sufficient; but will shipowners be willing to see more of their money set aside in their Clubs?) The next 10 years will be a time of test and challenge for the Clubs.

Second, the recent exposure of serious flaws in the Lloyd’s system has given fresh impetus to the search for alternative ways of managing risk. Momentum has been gathering behind various forms of self-insurance, including collective self-insurance. Thus we see today many groups of professional men, from lawyers to patent agents, forming themselves into mutual insurance societies to provide each other with protection against claims for negligence. Housing associations are doing likewise for cover against major defects appearing in their housing stock over 35-year periods. The P. & I. Clubs are the basic model for these new mutuals. Thus their experience, including their practices and the law that has built up around them, are now of interest to a wider audience than to shipowners alone.

So Dr Hazelwood’s second edition is to be welcomed at this time.

It covers all aspects of its subject, from the history of the Clubs and their constitutional status, through the mutual call system and the modern approach to mutual underwriting, to the rights and duties of insured members and the cover and ancillary services that the Clubs provide. The book is well-structured, with its varied topics easily accessed via the table of contents and index. It is generally well researched and is written in the admirably clear style of an author who obviously enjoys explaining both the operations and legal aspects of the Clubs in the non-technical language that will be appreciated by the general reader. As such it can certainly be recommended. I am not aware of a better or more readable treatment of the subject.

It would not be fair, however, to the potential purchaser of the book to fail to warn that there are some inevitable pitfalls for a practising lawyer and legal academic venturing beyond the law and offering the reader a guide to the practical operation of the Clubs. The understandable gaps in personal experience tend to be filled partly by references to Club Rules and partly by extensive reports of such legal decisions as happen to have dealt with or touched upon Club operations. It is no fault of the author that these legal decisions illustrate quite random aspects of the workings of the Clubs and of the rights and duties of their mem