The liner shipping industry has had its share of problems over the last 20 or 30 years, and not a few of them stemmed from the United States Shipping Act of 1916. That Act was intended to give liner conferences immunity from U.S. antitrust laws, on condition that the conference agreements were registered with the Federal Maritime Commission (or its predecessors) and that certain conditions concerning conference agreements and activities were fulfilled. That aim was not achieved. Decisions such as these in the Carnation, Svenska Amerika and Sabre Shipping cases in the 1960s severely eroded the antitrust immunity of conferences and put the onus on to conferences to justify their existence in accordance with the vague criteria contained in the Act. Complaints arising from bureaucratic delays and from the imposition of the Act on shipping companies based in countries which not only objected to the extraterritorial operation of the U.S. law, but also disagreed with the basic philosophy which it adopted towards conferences, combined with the other difficulties to make the pressure for revision of the Act irresistible. The outcome was the U.S. Shipping Act of 1984, which seeks: to permit the operation of open conferences subject to conditions, including the right of members to take independent action at short notice; to impose on the FMC the burden of showing that a conference should be disallowed, and to streamline its bureaucratic procedures; and to restore a substantial degree of immunity from the antitrust laws to shipping operations.

This volume, prepared by John W. McConnell, Jr., begins with a 59-page introduction, which includes an admirable and remarkably concise explanation of the background to the 1984 Act and a clear and helpful exposition of its provisions. The remainder of the book consists of the texts of the U.S. Act of 1984, of the House and Senate Bills (H.R. 1878 and s. 47) from which it derived, and of the House and Senate Committee Reports on those Bills, together with the text of the 1916 Act and a useful table comparing the contents of the two Acts and the two Bills. The book makes no attempt to offer a scholarly analysis of, or commentary on, the legislation. It is clearly intended to give to practitioners, and anyone else interested in American shipping laws, the full texts of the new law and of the official documents which lie behind it and which are a vital aid to its interpretation. It fulfils this modest but important task very well indeed. While the book is expensive it is well produced, and practitioners, at least, are likely to find that the convenience of having all this material in a single volume justifies its purchase.