For many years the law relating to guarantees was sadly neglected as a subject of legal writing, an astonishing deficiency in view of the importance of the subject. Fortunately, the 1980s have witnessed a resurgence in publications in this field. In 1982 there appeared the fourth edition of Rowlatt on the Law of Principal and Surety, a mere 46 years after the publication of the previous edition. Three years later we were treated to the fruits of Antipodean labour in the shape of a splendid new book, The Modern Contract of Guarantee, by James O’Donovan and John Phillips, a most comprehensive and scholarly work. Kevin McGuinness’s publication is the latest, standing in size midway between Rowlatt, edited by practising barristers, and The Modern Law of Guarantee, written by two academics.

Mr McGuinness’s book shows all the strengths, and a few of the weaknesses, which characterize publications by practitioners. Research and writing are an essential part of the raison d’être of an academic. The practitioner author has a harder task, not merely because he is not working in a research environment but also because of the unrelenting pressures of his daily work. It is therefore to be expected that his scholarship will be less exacting but that this will be compensated by the fruits of his experience and his familiarity with the law in action. So it is with The Law of Guarantee, a publication in which Mr McGuinness is entitled to take some pride.

The second chapter of the book sets the scene with a description of the role of guarantees in the contemporary business environment. This is an approach which other authors, who all too often plunge in medias res without giving a clue of the relevance of their subject to current business activity, would do well to emulate. Though short, this chapter is full of practical insights. Attention is drawn to the direct and indirect costs of guarantees and the signalling function of a guarantee by a company promoter as a measure of his degree of commitment to his creation.

Chapter 3 examines the nature of guarantee obligations. The author draws attention to the well-established, but frequently overlooked, rule of equity that where a creditor deals with two or more persons as principal debtors but is later told that one of them is or has become a surety for the other, the creditor must thereafter treat him as a surety. Some expansion of the discussion on this point would have been welcome. This reviewer has never understood by what concept of justice or fairness a creditor’s position vis-à-vis a debtor can be changed to the detriment of the creditor after he has made his advance in reliance on the fact that he was dealing with all parties as principals. Chapter 7 is devoted to the rights of the surety against the creditor, while Chapter 10 examines in detail the surety’s defences to a claim by the creditor. In his next edition the author might wish to reconsider the relationship between these two chapters. Analysis of the law of guarantees is often bedevilled, both in jurisprudence and in doctrine, by imprecision in the use of terms. The surety undoubtedly has some positive rights against the creditor—for example, the right of subrogation—but many of the “rights” ascribed to the surety are in truth no more than defences. So the surety does not have a right to require the creditor to preserve securities, he is merely released from his obli-