Professor of Commercial Law, Swansea University

Damien Cremean’s Law and Practice of Maritime Liens is the first substantial book on the subject since Rhidian Thomas came on the scene with his pioneering Maritime Liens 45 years ago. The long hiatus we can no doubt put down to two facts. Maritime liens are a pretty recondite area of law; furthermore, at least in England, issues specifically relating to them (as against mere statutory rights to arrest or sue in rem, which are something rather different) actually arise very rarely in the courts.

As regards this book, it is fair to say that it is rather different from a textbook in the sense normally understood in the common law world. Although written by a highly respected Brisbane academic in a faint Australian accent, the work is far from Australocentric. It is very widely researched and aggressively multi-jurisdictional. Apart from Australia and England (which he calls the UK: Scots readers, who will be well aware of having their own separate law on maritime arrestment, will just have to be forgiving), Dr Cremean covers in some little detail the admiralty regimes in New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Canada, India and South Africa. There is also quite frequent reference to the USA, not to mention the non-common-law People’s Republic of China.

As a result of this approach, what we have here is not the kind of enormously precise account of the minutiae of the law that you might expect in an ordinary practitioner’s text. The whole book indeed weighs in at under 250 pages (index and tables aside). In such a space you can’t get down that close in regard to 10 separate jurisdictions with very different histories and corresponding variations in their detailed provisions. Instead, the work is better described as a broad-brush summary of the issues thrown up by maritime liens. It is more a read-through work for those wanting a useful overview of the subject than a book you would look in to find the precise answer to some awkward issue of the interpretation of the Australian Admiralty Act 1988, the English Senior Courts Act 1981, or whatever.

The coverage is fairly predictable. There are sections on the concept and workings of the maritime lien in general, followed by separate chapters on the various heads of lien (including, in a nod to North America, necessaries, general average and charterers’ liens and, by reference to other jurisdictions, pilotage, none of which seems to raise a lien in London). These are followed by an account of how liens can be lost, and of the procedure for their enforcement.