Council Regulation 4056/86, laying down detailed rules for the application of Arts. 85 and 86 of the EC Treaty to Maritime Transport, came into force on 1 July 1987. The Regulation has given rise to many problems in practice. The scope of Art. 2, which provides that certain technical agreements fall outside Art. 85(1) altogether, is at best unclear and arguably redundant. Article 3, which provides block exemption for liner conferences, has numerous difficulties. Block exemption had to be granted in order to satisfy the UNCTAD Code of Conduct for Liner Conferences; but it is viewed with suspicion by the Commission, which has tended to adopt a narrow approach to its provisions. A particular problem is “multi-modalism”: are agreements concerning multi-modal transport permitted by the block exemption or is it necessary to apply for an individual exemption under a combination of different Regulations? Another difficulty is the application of Art. 85 to consortia and pools. If they are caught by Art. 85(1), there is no block exemption for them, although the Council of Ministers has now adopted legislation enabling the Commission to publish a block exemption: Council Regulation 479/92, 1992 O.J. L55/3. (Appendix 12 of Clough and Randolph wrongly calls the draft of this enabling legislation a proposed block exemption for consortia: a common misapprehension). The doubts and uncertainties surrounding the maritime transport legislation and DG IV’s limited resources mean that there has been limited application of it by the Commission, with the result that its full significance has yet to be appreciated.

Clough and Randolph is the first book to be published in the United Kingdom devoted exclusively to maritime transport and EC competition law. The authors begin by describing the legal and political background to EC competition law in this area, including a discussion of the UNCTAD position and the Brussels package. Chapter 2 describes EEC transport policy in relation to shipping and Chapter 3 looks more specifically at the competition rules and their application to shipping. The next three chapters describe respectively Council Regulation 4056/86 and liner conferences, procedures and the application of the competition rules in practice.

It is, of course, useful to have all the relevant materials on this subject together in one volume, although anyone specializing in this somewhat esoteric area would presumably have compiled their own materials anyway. It is not difficult to assemble the various Regulations and