Agreements on Jurisdiction and Choice of Law by Adrian Briggs
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.00746_3.x |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
There are, of course, the usual amount of editorial discrepancies, like a reference
on page 16 to ‘the ¢nal Imperial Conference, on 2 November 1940, decided for
war’ ^ which in fact was in 1941. Although these are distracting, and occur in
almostevery monograph, the editors at OUPmight havebeen a bit more diligent
about them. Such trivialities, however, in noway detract from the importance of
this book and the expert execution of the authors in delivering a much-needed
plug to a gaping and obvious hole in the growingliterature on international crim-
inal law.
This reappraisal of the Tokyo IMT is an outstanding scholarly e¡ort and well-
worth the hefty price tag for any scholar, jurist, practitioner or institution inter-
ested in building itsexpertise in the area of international criminallaw. Boister and
Cryer are to be commended for providing a much needed addition to the litera-
ture and I look forward to more work from them in this ¢eld. It will, no doubt,
be just as well done.
Michael J. Kelly
n
Adrian Briggs, Agreements on Jurisdictionand Choice of Law,Oxford: Oxford
University Press,2008, 572 pp, hb d145. 0 0.
This book is partof the Oxford PrivateInternational Law Series.It has been writ-
ten byan eminent English Con£ict of Lawsscholar and is predominantly, though
not exclusively, concerned with the e¡ect and operation of jurisdiction and choice
of law agreements when those agreements are directly or indirectly brought
before a court. The book is not, however, an attempt by the author to produce a
solo version of the well known practitioner’s text which he co-authors(A. Briggs
& P. Rees, CivilJuris diction and Judgmen ts (Informa Law, 4
th
ed., 2005)), which is not
to say that the text is of no utility to practitioners. On the contrary, practitioners,
as well as academicsand students, will ¢nd this book to contain muchof immedi-
ate and practical relevance. What Professor Briggs attempts, and achieves, is a dee-
per consideration of the legal nature and theoretical consequences of what both
forms of agreement may, and should, be understood to represe nt. Such a concep-
tual approach to jurisdiction and choice of law clauses is far from being the norm
in English Private International Law, so this is indeed awelcome book.The exist-
ing literature contains ample coverage of party autonomy on one hand, and the
immediate legal consequences of those agreements disputed via litigation on the
other.Wealso have a practitioner focussed coverage of what such litigationreveals
to be the dosand don’ts of drafting.Weare less well served however when enquir-
ing into the theoretical basis forgifting a binding force to private agreements con-
cerning the very Private International Law which would otherwise allocate both
jurisdictionand law to the dispute.We knowthat injunctionshave been employed
to hold parties to such agreements, bu t what of the right the inju nction implies? It
is the linking of the issues of party autonomy, manifested via agreements, and the
n
School of Law,Creighton University
Reviews
321
r2009 The Authors. Journal Compilationr20 09 The Modern LawReview Limited.
(2009) 72(2) 313^329
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