With this seventh issue the Yearbook of European Law will cease to be under the general editorship of Professor Jacobs of London University. He has been transferred to the European Court of Justice as the British Advocate-General. The editorial burden will in future be on the capable shoulders of Dr Barav and Mr Wyatt, of Essex and Oxford Universities respectively. This Yearbook for 1987 well upholds the high standard of previous volumes as an authoritative and readable account, from many hands, of significant developments in European law, this term embracing not only the law of the European Communities but also legal issues relating to EFTA and the Council of Europe, especially the Council’s greatest achievement, the European Convention on Human Rights.

Extending to over 400 pages, the Yearbook can accommodate substantial articles difficult to fit into the strait jacket of periodicals. In the volume under review, several such articles will be of particular interest to the readers of this Quarterly because of their relevance to commercial law, both British and European. Thus, the first two articles both provide a valuable comparison between the United States and the European experience in relation, first, to competition (or antitrust) law and, secondly, to so-called “tying agreements” (e.g., if you buy my pan, you must simultaneously buy its lid).

In the competition article, Richard Whish and Brenda Sufrin discuss how far a “rule of reason” has been, or should be, read into Art. 85(1) of the Rome Treaty. Read subject to such a rule, Art. 85(1) would not invalidate “reasonable” agreements where they neither received an individual exemption from the Commission under Art. 86(3)—a lengthy process, nor came within one of the six block exemptions. After an exhaustive comparison of the American and European experience, including the judgments of the European Court of Justice, the authors conclude that the European Court is not moving towards the adoption of a U.S.-style rule of reason, and they welcome this resistance to the American approach under the Sherman Act. As they wisely point out, the context of U.S. antitrust law is very dissimilar from that of the EEC. They endorse the view that a rule of reason under Art. 85(1) would bring more uncertainty for businessmen. Certainty is important. “It is in no-one’s interest to retard collaboration between firms striving to compete in a competitive international market. However, the best answer to this problem is for the Commission to continue to improve its procedures, to publish block exemptions where this is possible, and to develop such notions as objective necessity and potential competition.” By contrast, the rule of reason would stifle the proper application of Art. 85, which, precisely because of its more ample wording, does not bear the same intellectual burden that the lapidary phrase “restraint of trade” does under the Sherman Act.

On tying agreements a not dissimilar conclusion against transplanting the American solution is reached by Denis Waelbroeck in his well-reasoned article. A wealth of American case law has established the illegality per se of many categories of tying agreements as prohibited by the Clayton Act, the Sherman Act or the Federal Trade Commission Act. There is, however, no generalized prohibition of all such agreements: some, for example, have been saved