Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - ENFORCEMENT OF MARITIME CLAIMS
ENFORCEMENT OF MARITIME CLAIMS by D. C. Jackson, Professor of Law at the University of Southampton. Lloyd’s of London Press Ltd., London (1985, lxi and 376 pp., plus 93 pp. Appendices and 14pp. Index). Hardback £39.50.
Throughout this century, maritime lawyers have suffered from the decline in the quality of books dealing with the jurisdiction of and remedies provided by the English Admiralty Court. In 1902, the third edition of Williams & Bruce’s Admiralty Practice was published. This splendid work combined an historical perspective, a high level of technical expertise and a text which even today remains interesting to read. When it became out of date, it was replaced by the more rigidly utilitarian work of the same title by Roscoe in 1931, a serviceable book, but neither as broad nor as deep. The downward progress accelerated when Roscoe’s work was replaced by Volume 1 of British Shipping Laws, still called Admiralty Practice, in 1961. This last work consisted of little more than relevant parts of the Rules of the Supreme Court, set out in full in a not very logical order, accompanied by a text of great banality. A bad book when first published, it is now so out of date as to be virtually useless. Lawyers practising in the field of shipping law urgently needed a new and modern treatment of the jurisdiction of the English courts in maritime cases. There is therefore a predisposition to greet the publication of a new book on the enforcement of maritime claims with enthusiasm and to hope that a gap in the literature will be repaired. Professor Jackson’s book does not really fulfil that hope.
Jackson is not without its virtues, and is indeed preferable to Admiralty Practice wherever the purposes of the two books intersect. The general objectives of the two books are, however, very different. Jackson neither is nor purports to be a simple procedural guide to the workings of the Admiralty Court. That is a pity: the best parts of the book are those which deal with the minutiae of English admiralty procedure. Unfortunately, it seems that Professor Jackson, not content merely to repair a deficiency in the texts at present available, wished to scan wider horizons; and the effect on the book has not been to its advantage.
The trouble is that the aims of the work are at once excessively ambitious and insufficiently precise. In the preface, Professor Jackson says that the work “is intended to be based
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