Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEWS
Thomas Krebs
THE UNAUTHORISED AGENT: Perspectives from European and Comparative Law. Edited by D Busch, Attorney-at-Law, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroeck, Amsterdam; Professor of Financial Law, University of Nijmegen, and LJ Macgregor, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Edinburgh. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009) xxxiv and 448 pp, plus 16 pp Index. ISBN 90780521863889. Hardback £70.
This volume is a collection of essays, written by scholars from different jurisdictions, dealing with the same basic question of agency law: what happens if an unauthorised person purports to enter into a contract on somebody else’s behalf? The stated aim is the drafting of the agency section of a European civil code. The jurisdictions examined, however, are not limited to Europe—there are chapters on the US position and on South African law, as well as a general overview of the impact of the US Restatement on Commonwealth jurisdictions. There are also chapters on “soft-law” harmonisation efforts such as the Principles of European Contract Law and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts.
The title of the book may appear somewhat odd: if we define an agent as a person with authority to act in his principal’s name, rendering his principal liable and entitled on a contract entered into
BOOK REVIEWS
153