Published by Cornell Maritime Press, Centreville, Maryland (1981, 468 pp., plus 136 pp. Appendices and Index.)

In his considerably enlarged and clearly presented Second Edition of “Marine Insurance and General Average in the United States” Leslie Buglass has again produced a readily comprehensible textbook on the complex subjects of which he has had very great practical experience both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. He recounts those English legal decisions and the Marine Insurance Act 1906 upon which much of American law of marine insurance is based, and important subsequent English judgments are compared with jurisprudence in the U.S.

As in the first edition, the incorporation of legal references into the text and the avoidance of footnotes allows the reader to assimilate quickly essential information for further research when necessary and the author names various papers, especially those presented by the Chairmen of the Associations of Average Adjusters, which would make a valuable contribution to such study.

After his widely acclaimed first edition, which is now out of print, was published in 1973, Leslie Buglass wrote “General Average and the York-Antwerp Rules 1974— American Law and Practice”, and this subject is now covered in this enlarged volume. The extensive revision in 1977 by the American Institute of Marine Underwriters of its major clauses which are reproduced in the Appendices is discussed.

The effect of the decision in 1975 of the Supreme Court of the U.S. in the case of U.S.A. v. Reliable Transfer, after 120 years of equal fault in both-to-blame collisions, to introduce a new rule of apportionment of damages is analysed in detail with references to subsequent judgments. More space is devoted to cargo insurance and, in a new chapter dealing with marine insurance on the rivers, harbours, coastal and inland waterways of the U.S., Leslie Buglass says that the volume of cargo carried, mostly by large flotillas, presents in major casualties problems of marine insurance of considerable complexity to which a practical and commercial approach would be applied by an average adjuster were he to be appointed.

International and domestic legislation on oil pollution and the increasing importance thereof, and of Limitation of Liability, as under the 1976 Convention, are discussed, as is the attitude of the U.S. Government to these subjects and to the Hague-Visby amendments to the Hague Rules.