The first claim made there is that the book is written to offer “students studying this topic… an accessible, comprehensive overview of the subject from a leading expert in the field”. It is thus clearly intended to go up against the well-established student text by John F Wilson, now in its seventh edition and unrevised since 2010 (hereinafter simply referred to as “Wilson”). The next edition of that book, now in the hands of both Professor Wilson’s and Professor Todd’s colleague at Southampton, Professor Filippo Lorenzon, is not due until the end of 2017, so that this book could not have been published at a more opportune time. To the student, this area of law is difficult to access: the terminology of carriage of goods by sea and the underlying concepts are all but impossible to penetrate for the uninitiated. Another introductory text is therefore welcome, particularly given the delayed publication of the next edition of Wilson.

We can break the first claim made for the book down into three parts: accessibility, comprehensiveness and expertise. We shall take these in turn. The first test of a student text is: how well are the basic principles, the subject matter of the book, explained? Would a reasonably bright student, who has already studied English contract law, be able to follow the exposition? The difficulty of achieving this is, I would suggest, inversely proportional to the author’s familiarity with the subject matter, and the claim that the author is a leading expert in the field is certainly borne out by the difficulty he has in making concepts that are second nature to him accessible to non-expert readers. His introductory section on the distinction between “charterparties and bills of lading” is peppered with terminology which most students will find somewhat confusing. The juxtaposition of charterparties on the one hand and bills of lading (as opposed to bill of lading contracts) on the other is problematic in itself: one is a contract of carriage, the other a document issued pursuant to a contract of carriage. This is why our reasonably bright student will probably be somewhat bewildered as he is told that a “charterer may well also hold a bill of lading, either as shipper or subsequent holder, and there can be an issue if charterparty and bill of lading terms differ” (p.4). It would have been better to explain, at rather greater length, who the different actors in international trade are, by what labels (such as “shipper”) they are referred to and what transactions they enter into, for what reasons and in what contexts.

When it comes to comprehensiveness, the book cannot be faulted: this is a student introductory text and, if anything, the detail, particularly when it comes to discussion of the better known standard forms, is greater than would necessarily be expected of a book of this sort. The book proceeds along well-trodden lines, with Chapter 2 providing a background overview of “Carriage and the general law of contract” (with most of which