Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - CHITTY ON CONTRACTS (27TH EDITION)
CHITTY ON CONTRACTS (27th Edition). General Editor A. G. Guest, C.B.E., Q.C., M.A., F.B.A., F. C.I.A., Bencher of Gray’s Inn, Professor of English Law in the University of London. Sweet & Maxwell, London (1994). 2 vols. cccxlvii and 2945 pp., plus 139 pp. Index. Hardback £225.
A new edition of the leading practitioner work on contract must be warmly welcomed. It has grown again, of course: the text of volume 1 now occupies 1580 pages (rather than 1449) and the work would presumably have been even longer had the publishers not managed to squeeze more words onto a page in this edition than in the last.
This is a revision designed to bring the text up to date, rather than to make structural changes. There are, however, two changes of presentation which make it notably easier to use. First, the basic arrangement is still by numbered paragraphs but these are now numbered within each chapter rather than simply within the whole work. So, the discussion of the Arbitration Act 1979 is now in para. 15–005 (being within Chap. 15, Arbitration Clauses), rather than the less informative para. 1065. This helps the reader who uses the index to identify the section of text most likely to assist in his researches. The second change of presentation is to place most quotations in separate paragraphs in smaller type. This helps not only to break up the text, but also to highlight the key quotations which support the discussion in the text.
The work is up to date to early 1994: it is five years since the last edition (rather than six years for the previous two editions). This gap may well be acceptable as a general rule (and perhaps we should just be thankful that Chitty has not joined the ranks of the looseleaf publications) but might it perhaps have been better to wait just a little longer to incorporate further changes known to be coming? The most obvious example is the control of unfair terms in consumer contracts as a result of the EC Council Directive, which is naturally discussed at many points in the work although it was known that the form of the United Kingdom implementing legislation should be settled by the end of 1994. If the time between editions had again been six years, the law would be stated on the basis of the U.K. Regulations, rather than entirely on the basis of the Directive (of course, given the way
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