The second edition of Mr Cromie’s manual on where to choose for the purposes of international commercial litigation (the predecessor coming out sub nom. Park and Cromie) is a great deal better than the first one was. Perhaps there should be a general rule that books which are intended to come out in a second edition are not reviewed in public until the first edition has allowed teething troubles to be sorted out. The justification for noticing this new edition, then, is to acknowledge that this welcome change has taken place. Particulars need only briefly be given. First, the contributions from foreign lawyers appear to be much more detailed than before, and they are almost all rendered in perfectly idiomatic English. If the purpose of the book is to allow the reader to measure various systems against each other in relation to particular topics, it helps that the material is arranged thematically, and not as separate and discrete national chapters. The information which is conveyed about the nature, the advantages and the drawbacks, of litigating in the courts of England and Wales, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the United States has the feel of reliability about it; and, although this recourse to account can be only a first step in the decision- taking process, it is unlikely to induce a false one. One might perhaps venture to raise a doubt about the selection of courts: litigation in Japan may well be a rare event and a still rarer choice. By contrast, the extraordinary and overreaching behaviour of the courts of the Netherlands, especially in the light of their evident belief that they constitute the courthouse of the world for intellectual property disputes, means that there is a regrettable case for including this expansionist jurisdiction in the third edition. Only those sections on choice of law are so thin that there is legitimate doubt as to whether they are worth their place.

There are just a few places where a work like this can offer something which a more orthodox text cannot: discussion of a single problematic issue from distinct and practitioner-oriented vantage points is one. Two examples. One might have been the precise jurisdiction of the main Brussels and Lugano Convention courts to grant the provisional relief referred to in Art. 24 of the Conventions. It was an unavoidable misfortune for Mr Cromie that the amendment to rules of domestic English jurisdiction (S.I. 1997 Nos 302 and 415), which were hardly heralded at all, came into force at about the time his text went to press. But, if one has ever tried to discover from, say, a French lawyer what are the jurisdictional limitations on the powers to act of the various courts and Presidents, one will realize how obscure or avoided the answer is. If one has read the commentators, one is equally aware how divergent and difficult are the views of foreign commentators on what is the precise jurisdictional basis for such relief, given that all that Art. 24 does is to remove a possible jurisdictional objection. But little of this emerges from the text. A second example might have been to wish for more of an inter-contributor discussion on anti-suit injunctions: we understand that different countries have sharply divergent views, but it would have been good for these to be expanded on by practitioners for a change. Indeed, it is not altogether clear that the contributors saw the sections submitted by their peers before finishing up their own. While this may maintain the purity of the national contributions, it sacrifices an opportunity for dialogue between sensible people who actually know how the law works in practice (something which is to be distinguished from the toxic waste too often and voluminously generated by academic comparative lawyers).

It is evident from Mr Cromie’s manual that one impact of the Brussels and Lugano Conventions has been to raise the degree of jurisdictional (and to a much smaller extent, procedural) uniformity as between the Contracting States. Though each Contracting State preserves its own traditional law