It is for several reasons a pity to have to say it, but Mr Jaffey has been especially ill-served by statutory alteration to the rules of the conflict of laws. In earlier years he published articles dealing with the general principles underpinning choice of law, and dealing more specifically with choice of law in relation to various aspects of contract, tort, arbitration, and marriage. These were an important part of the reading of the conflicts lawyer, offering as they did a measured, gentle, and comprehensible evaluation of various aspects of common law choice of law. Had the world remained as it was when these papers were written, it would have been a significant advantage to have them updated and collected together.

But the world did not. The choice of law regimes for contract and tort are, as is well known, now governed by statute: the former as the result of an unwelcome European Convention; the latter as the result of self-inflicted injury for which we have no-one to blame but ourselves. As a result, the basic papers for four of the eight chapters have had to be much altered, though a fifth, also dealing with contract, is substantially derived from material which did originally deal with an aspect of the Convention, and survives largely intact. Of the three remaining, the chapter on choice of law in arbitrations has been pretty comprehensively overtaken by the Arbitration Act 1996 (a development of which Mr Jaffey will have become aware immediately upon delivering the manuscript, one may guess), leaving marriage alone as the single specific chapter to which Mr Jaffey’s original prescription still applies. This, though, may be assumed to be of only amateur interest to the broad readership of this Quarterly. That leaves the general introductory chapter, dealing with choice of law principles and techniques. This now takes the form of an account of how choice of law might have been approached if the matter were tabula rasa. It isn’t, obviously.

Mr Jaffey is still able to offer his original analysis of the common law rules, and of the solutions which the common law might have been sensible to reach, as the measuring stick against which to evaluate the modem statutory schemes for choice of law. By and large the conclusion appears to be that, left to their own devices, the courts would not have been wise to evolve rules in terms corresponding to the statutes; and in one signal case where they would have done, the provision of the statute—Art. 7(1) of the Rome Convention—was prevented by Parliament from having effect in England. The practical trouble is that this does not get us very far. Even where the statutory rules may be drafted loosely enough to allow for guidance from the scholars of the subject, such as may be the case with Private International Law (Misc. Prov.) Act 1995, s. 12, which allows for making exceptions to the general choice of law rule for tort claims, it is too early to be confident that even here there will still be enough room to manoeuvre as Mr Jaffey recommends and to give general coherence to the way the exception will work.

It is necessary to record that Mr Jaffey deals with choice of law rules on the footing that their sphere of application is already established and need not be tested. He does not spend much time on determination of the outer edges of the concepts of “tort” and “contract” as these must be understood and interpreted for the purpose of these new rules. This is a pity, for such an examination might also have led him to consider the extent to which the boundaries have moved. It might also have led him to ask whether any form of restitutionary or equitable claim might also be brought within these choice of law rules. One might have thought that the general approach which Mr Jaffey adopts, that is, of seeking to define choice of law rules in the light of the underlying policies which should be served in the area in question, would have had particular value in those places where the choice of law rules are less certain and may still lie in the province of the common law conflict of laws. But the attractions of this challenge do not seem to have been sufficient to tempt him.

There are occasional typographical matters: Red Sea Insurance Co. Ltd v. Bouygues [1995] 1 A.C. 190 is cited as being 50 years earlier than it was (p. 108); and it was Mr Fay, not Mr Kay, who