Volume 1 of the new Yearbook Maritime Law is a wide-ranging collection of articles, case law summaries, legislative updates and notes on various international governmental and non-governmental maritime organizations. The theme of the Yearbook, as its title suggests, is the maritime law of 1984. That the Yearbook should not be produced until 1986 nor generally disseminated until the first months of 1987 is perhaps inevitable, but the time lag between the occurrence of events and the publication of them in the Yearbook is a real problem and one to which I shall return.