By Wilson Lui and Anselmo Reyes. Hart, Oxford (2025) c and 341 pp plus 41 pp Glossary, Bibliography and Index. ISBN 9781509956470. Hardback £166.

Under the general editorship of Anselmo Reyes, there has emerged a dozen (with more to come) volumes having as their focus private international law in Asia. Five (so far) of these are monographs explaining national rules of private international law: for China, India, Indonesia and Japan, and now, with the book under current review, Hong Kong. Advertised on its dust cover as a “one-stop reference to Hong Kong private international law”, this work may offer an entry point for anyone wondering how the law of Hong Kong deals with issues of private international law almost 30 years after its becoming one of the systems of law operating on the territory of the Chinese state. Making a fair evaluation is not without its challenges.

The modus operandi, it appears, is this: to state the whole of the law, and to vouch for the content, to the extent possible, by citation of Hong Kong materials, with a mere soupçon of English authority connected with the matters at hand being confined to the footnotes. So for example, we find (p.79) the recent and convoluted judicial description of a “good arguable case” attested to by a decision of the Court of First Instance, with the two decisions by which Lord Sumption created and sought to justify the tortured thing being simply named-checked in the small print. The centrepiece of the discussion of the principle of forum non conveniens (p.85) is a 2014 decision of the Court of Final Appeal, which makes a lot of sense. But only three pages (pp 85–87) are given over to this cardinal principle and its multi-faceted application in legal practice. Spiliada is referred to only as the origin of the doctrine, and of the many, many, refining decisions of the Privy Council, House of Lords or Supreme Court, only one (Vedanta v Lungowe) is mentioned, and that also only by name in a footnote. And so on. The law governing an arbitration agreement is stated (p.309) by reference to a decision of the Court of First Instance, but the two Supreme Court cases which came before, and the correction issued by the third one, which came after, are, once again, only footnote names. It is not easy to suppose that a judge in Hong Kong would assess the guidance to be had from the jurisprudence in the same way. This would not be a sign that the Hong Kong