By D. R. Thomas, LL.B., M.A. Published by Stevens & Sons, Ltd., London (1980, xlix and 347 pp., plus 49 pp. Appendices and Index.) Hardback £35

Extended, up-to-date treatment of the law relating to liens of all descriptions has long been overdue. Any contribution to the jurisprudence in this area is therefore to be welcomed. This is particularly so in shipping law, in view of the practical significance of liens in the effective enforcement of claims. This new book has its genesis in Griffith Price’s Law of Maritime Liens (1940), of which it was originally designed to be a second edition. It appears as Volume 14 of the British Shipping Laws series. There is, in the preparation of a subsequent edition of another author’s book, an inevitable tension between updating the existing work and affording the editor full scope to present his independently researched conclusions as he thinks best. The decision to allow the original work to rest in its historical context, as an independent source of reference, and to produce a fresh viewpoint is therefore to be commended.

This is not to say that the author has ignored the historical foundations of his subject, which should to some extent quite properly be outlined in any book which is intended to form an independent and authoritative, specialist monograph. In particular, no apology is required, therefore, for the discussion of bottomry. Equally, the author makes no attempt to shirk his duty to analyse the theoretical nature of maritime liens, an examination which might be considered to be largely irrelevant in a book obviously intended primarily for practitioners unless it is remembered that it is an appreciation of a subject’s underlying principles that enables a proper understanding of the working of that subject and its consistent development.

While sympathising with the author’s broad approach, however, one is occasionally tempted to query whether, despite his own engaging style of writing, he has not too closely adopted the usual narrative presentation familiar with practitioners’ books, whereby the various components of the subject-matter are carefully dissected and re-assembled without any very rigorous attempt to be as detailed or as comprehensive as possible, to illuminate the reader, to query orthodox explanations or to root out