Neil Andrews, Contract Rules – Decoding English Law
| Author | |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2018.0476 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Pages | 176-177 |
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
When this reviewer was sent her – long and eagerly awaited – copy of “Contract Rules – Decoding English Law”, the book review editor very fittingly remarked in his accompanying correspondence that this publication sounded “like an ambitious endeavour”; he was right. Considering the vastness and complexity of the subject of (English) Contract Law, this book embodies indeed an ambitious undertaking which, as Andrews himself rightly points out in the “Preface”, borders on “mission impossible” because “the law of contract is expensive to find and hard to summarise”. This is doubtlessly a very apt description of the feelings, which many practitioners, scholars and students of English contract law will have experienced over the years. Indeed, any reader of “Contract Rules” might be forgiven any scepticism as to whether the book's aim “to offer rules which are neither too detailed […] nor too thin” (Preface) with the aim of achieving “secure guidance” had been achievable or whether this undertaking had been doomed to failure from the start. Without wishing to pre-empt the final verdict on this publication though, readers of “Contract Rules” can rest assured that they will not be disappointed by its contents nor its quality as this book represents, at the very least, a valuable and much to be welcomed addition to the existing body of academic and practitioner texts on the general principles of English contract law written by a noted expert in this area.
Moreover, this publication can reasonably be considered to close a gap in the market of books on English contract law as a number of the titles already on the market which deal with the general principles of this area of law might be regarded as being either too expansive or expensive (or both) to be of more immediate practical value and applicability to their readers. Indeed, the coverage and explanation of the law in several of these publications (regardless of their undisputed general wider academic value) is not as accessible as the coverage and explanation contained in “Contract Rules” which states the relevant legal principles in relatively short yet accurate terms (the substantive law is covered in 391 pages). Again, Andrews himself recognises the importance of accessibility of the law in order for it to be of use: the very first sentence in the “Preface” states that “[l]aw which can only be tentatively identified after a trawl through extensive authorities must be condemned as not fit for purpose”. This...
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