International Construction Law Review
BOOK REVIEW: CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTS FOR INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS – AN INTERNATIONAL GUIDE TO APPLICATION, FIRST EDITION
REVIEWED BY PROFESSOR JOHN SHARKEY AM, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, MELBOURNE LAW SCHOOL
By Phillip Loots and Dr Donald Charrett. Published by Informa Law from Routledge, May 2022. Pages: 1450. ISBN 9781032074290. Price: Hardback £200, ebook £150.
The prolific authors of this work recognised before most that the rapid globalisation of commerce of recent decades brought with it the growing development of a lex constructionis or, in their words, “the law relating to construction projects which is widely accepted internationally in legal jurisdictions subject to the rule of law and which recognises the parties’ freedom of contract, irrespective of the specific impact of statute law”.
Building on their previous work, including The Application of Contracts in Developing Oil and Gas Projects (2019, Informa Law from Routledge, ISBN 9780367135522), and with an emphasis on the practical, the authors here offer what they modestly describe as a guide to the law relating to contracts for infrastructure projects “intended for the use of engineers and other professionals who are involved in the negotiation and administration of construction contracts, to enable them to understand the risks involved, and how to minimise them”.
A sense of the scale of what the authors have attempted is provided by a simple page count. The contents section runs to 35 pages in a work of 1,450 pages. The focus is on construction contracts entered into by commercial organisations operating in a business environment. Contracts for residential construction are accordingly expressed to be beyond the work’s scope, as are contracts for design only.
The authors are clear eyed about the challenges they faced in embarking upon this project. Discussions about a lex constructionis can downplay the difficulties of writing a text on construction contract law as it applies internationally. Those difficulties include:
- • Differences between bodies of law such as civil law and the common law;
- • The application of different terminologies to identical or similar concepts in different jurisdictions; and
- • The idiosyncrasies of local statute law and its power to overrule common law and produce local law variants.
While Chapter 1 is a compendious Introduction, it acknowledges that the work’s geographical reach is concentrated on the differences presented by a comparison of the common law and civil law. The lessening of procedural differences between the two bodies of law in recent years is noted; the
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