Political predictions can sometimes be perilous, but UK ratification of the Hague Judgments Convention (HJC) is at last certain. The instrument was formally signed in January this year; ratification will follow the necessary legislative tweaks (which can be made by statutory instrument) and formal submission of the text to Parliament. A year later the Convention will be activated as regards this country.

This is absolutely understandable. The UK may have been excluded by a petulant EU from joining the EEA’s Lugano regime on jurisdiction and the enforcement of judgments. Nevertheless, it still has every desire to have its judgments portable as far as possible within Europe, and a converse willingness to enforce judgments from EU states. Since the EU is already party to the Convention, the UK’s obvious course is to sign up too. Indeed, the HJC might even turn out better than Lugano in the long term, if only because it lacks the dirigiste rules about direct jurisdiction which at times limited the international reach of the pre-Brexit Commercial Court.

All this makes very welcome a serious OUP text on the new instrument. Michael Brand, Paul Coffee and Ronald Herrup’s The Hague Judgments Convention 2019, following a parallel book from two of the authors on the 2005 Convention on Choice of Court Agreements, gives us a neat background account of the HJC, together with detailed commentary on it from beginning to end. The whole thing is written in a rather continental expository style, though all three authors are actually American, and the subject is covered from a noticeably American perspective, with a whole chapter given over to a discussion of the potential fit between the HJC and the byzantine system of US constitutional and conflict-of-laws rules. Appended for reference is a very useful reprint of the lengthy semi-official commentary on the HJC, commissioned by the Hague Conference from Francisco Garcimartín and Geneviève Saumier.

I enjoyed reading through this book. It is well produced; its coverage tries to be comprehensive; and the authors, all well-established transnational lawyers, commendably do not hesitate to express their own viewpoints about the HJC as a whole. Overall, it is fair to say that they give it two cheers. It is, they say, a positive achievement; nevertheless, they do suggest, with some plausibility, that the instrument could have been drafted in a