“In the present era of specialisation,” wrote Lord Rodger of the original Companion to Law, published in 1980 and the sole work of David M Walker, “perhaps only Professor Walker would have dared to write what amounts to a mini-encyclopaedia of law, dealing not merely with English law, but Scots, Roman, Irish, American, German, French, Swiss, South African and many other systems besides” (A F Rodger, “Good companion?” (1981) 1 OJLS 257). The original Companion is a unique work. I would call it a classic – a mine of golden legality whose nuggets can be sourced elsewhere only with difficulty. And although, as Lord Rodger pointed out, there are impurities, idiosyncrasies or flaws, call them what you will, they are easily tolerated: the original Companion is a first port of call, not the terminus, on any voyage of obscure legal research.
If the original Companion was the product of a certain generation, so too is the New Companion. The New Companion is rather like New Labour. The approach has moved away from details (arbitrarily selected) to themes (still arbitrarily selected). The content is more broad-brush and, to this reviewer's heathen palate, on occasion somewhat bland. But that may be an unfair criticism for a handsome volume intended for the non-lawyer. When (if) I pick up the Oxford Companion to Cosmology or the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, I might prefer a volume like that produced by Cane and Conaghan to the Miscellany-at-Law (without the wit) compiled by Walker.
But the New Companion may still be an occasion for a Scottish lament. The original Companion is an important repository (a good Walker-word) of little-known details of Scots law, and many other legal systems besides. The editors of the New Companion, in the Preface, accept that “‘Anglo-centrism’ is disrespectful and can be seriously misleading … However lawyers are typically expert in the law of only one jurisdiction and we have not always been able to ensure that the relevant differences between the laws of the various UK jurisdictions have been recorded.” Where Scots law was perhaps over-represented in the original Companion, it has now been relegated, along with much else non-English, to a few short, generic headings, although these headings are, I should add, first-class. (One serious defect in a multi-authored work such as this is the lack of a table detailing each contributor's entries, so it is difficult to identify all the entries by Scottish...
