The Brussels I Regulation is undergoing massive surgery. The process was got off the ground with a very fine Report produced under the aegis of the University of Heidelberg; and, as the debate has moved along, or has shot off in all directions at once, many comments and analysis papers have been produced, several of which have been published. Although it is never quite clear how far those who have the power to decide the final shape of the Regulation pay real attention to any of this material, it all provides grist to the academic mill. In this sense, the eleven papers collected by the British Institute and published in this slim, attractive, and straight to the point, collection are interesting, even though it lacks tables or index and the titular reference to the reform Proposal as being “uncovered” is hard to understand.

However, the trouble is that the draft of the Regulation keeps on changing. A draft dated 1 June 2012 was presented by the Presidency to the Council of Ministers for the Council Meeting held the following week. It may be that by the time this review is published it will have changed again, and more than once, as, inch by painful inch, the parties try to stitch together a text which will reconcile the unrealistic original ambitions of the Commission, the caution of the Parliament, the divergent interests of the Member States, the anxieties of commentators and, just possibly, the informed opinions of those who actually practice the law and who will have to live with whatever is made.

This hits a book like this hard, because, between the finalising of a paper and the publication of the book, changes to the text may take much of the wind from the writer’s sails or suggest that it was built upon sand. It has certainly happened here; and in this respect it is surely a shortcoming that the book neither publishes the text with which it is dealing nor states clearly the date of the draft which is under discussion. But examples abound. Probably the most obvious concerns the dissociation of arbitration from the mechanism of the Regulation: the 1 June draft proposes to make plain that arbitration is, more or less (though little devils will doubtless still lie in the detail), not to be affected by the Regulation, and that courts seised with applications or proceedings in matters related to arbitration may deal with most of them as though the Regulation had never been made. This means that the content of the paper (Harris & Lein) on Arbitration and Brussels I, which deals with the Commission’s earlier, and very different, proposal, has been substantially overtaken by events. So also the paper (Borrás) on jurisdiction over defendants from non-Member States: the original suggestion that they be treated as though they were domiciled in Member States was one of the weirder and less convincing ideas to have crossed the Commission’s mind; the provision which currently exists as Art.4 of the Regulation is now proposed to remain almost intact, with only minor amendments made for defendants in consumer and employment contract cases. The paper on