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W W McBryde, THE LAW OF CONTRACT IN SCOTLAND Edinburgh: W Green & Son Ltd (www.wgreen.co.uk), Scottish Universities Law Institute, 3rd edn, 2007. clviii + 818 pp. ISBN 9780414016101. £175.

Document Cited authorities 3 Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 January 2009
DOI10.3366/E1364980908001145
Pages158-160
Date01 January 2009

The publication of Professor McBryde's The Law of Contract in Scotland in 1987 is rightly considered a landmark in Scottish private law scholarship, and the production of a third edition to replace the second edition published in 2001 is to be warmly welcomed. Although the author does not rule out a further edition, it may be noted with regret that he regards the third as probably the last with which he will be involved. In this sense Professor McBryde's magnum opus has taken its final form. In the second edition, McBryde remarked that since the first edition “the law of contract in Scotland has been transformed” (ix). Clearly the same degree of transformation would not be expected in the six years which have since passed. Broadly speaking the new edition is therefore an updated version of the previous one, without major reworking or restructuring, though it is significant that roughly 500 new cases have been added to its apparatus. The table of cases, in relatively small print, now runs to 116 pages. Behind this lies one of the broader developments which the author himself makes a point of noting in the preface, namely that decisions of the Court of Session have come to constitute (in his opinion) the main body of authority for all main areas of Scottish contract law. The implicit contrast is with Gloag, who, as McBryde notes, relied to a greater extent on English authority on doubtful points in the writing of his own work three quarters of a century ago. Now it may be said that “the core of our law has been explained by Scottish judges” (vii). Indeed, McBryde considers that the modern Court of Session continues to do this job very effectively, concluding that Scottish contract law can be said to be of “international standard” (vii).

It would be a mistake to see this evaluation as reflecting some kind of simplistic nationalistic pride. It rests implicitly upon a growing number of judicial decisions and important claims about methodology and what constitutes an appropriate normative approach to the development of the law. These claims are reflected in the fact that McBryde has always made the law as decided in the courts the central platform for his analysis. In part this simply relates to accommodating the needs of writing a practitioner's textbook, as McBryde himself has characterised his text. However, in this age of European harmonisation measures, encroaching upon at least the margins (if not yet the core) of the private law of contract, as well as...

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