Those who are familiar with previous editions of Ivamy’s “Marine Insurance” and with the three companion volumes in Butterworths Insurance Library—“General Principles of Insurance Law”, “Fire and Motor Insurance” and “Personal Accident and Other Insurances”—will find no surprises in the third edition of this work. True to form, this is a book not to be read but referred to. Professor Ivamy’s prime objective is clearly to provide exhaustive coverage for the practitioner, and in this he is relatively successful, subject to one or two specific doubts expressed below. The text is concise and every proposition is supported by footnotes containing all the relevant authorities, a feature which the practising lawyer will find invaluable. A particularly pleasing aspect is a use of American and Commonwealth authorities much wider than in the rest of the series, although of course they are of particular relevance in this context. Unfortunately, the cost of a strictly practical emphasis is to render the work both heavy going and of little interest to academics. The reader is regularly diverted to the often lengthy footnotes containing not just references to, but also facts of, cases, and, although the footnotes are neither as numerous nor voluminous as in other volumes in this series, the style militates against relaxing reading.

Further, as the text consists simply of the statement of propositions, the facts of cases and the setting out of statutes and Institute Clauses, there is little or no critical analysis of the law. Perhaps the worst manifestation of this is Professor Ivamy’s persistent refusal to highlight, or even admit to, the inconsistencies in reasoning between cases. Instead, the book is content to imply that the differences are factual only, and conflicting authorities are often linked by oversimplifying phrases such as “On the other hand” or “But”.

These points do not, however, detract from the worth of this work to the practitioner, and a new edition is generally to be welcomed. The present reviewer has just two petty quibbles. The first concerns Professor Ivamy’s failure to put Marine Insurance in its true context of the International Sale of Goods. Admittedly, sections 16–20 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 are reproduced in the appendix, but they command no more than one sentence in the text as a whole, and the vital question of when the buyer and seller are able to insure is thus virtually ignored. Merely presenting