Professor of Property Law, University of Southampton

Billed as “highly anticipated”, this second edition of the English law governing ship mortgages, published in 2017, provides a revised and updated examination of the subject from the first edition published in 2001. It now runs to over 500 pages, as against the first edition’s almost 400 pages. Much has happened in the intervening years, not least a global financial crisis triggering a recession in global trade, a consequent adverse effect on the shipping industry, including the infamous insolvency of Hanjing Shipping Co Ltd. Making sure that a ship mortgage, and the associated security package, provide the greatest protection to a financier is thus of prime importance. Yet this is the only current book on the subject. Constant’s The Law Relating to the Mortgage of Ships was published almost a century ago. It is thus fortunate that this new edition provides a comprehensive, knowledgeable, yet practical resource.

Graeme Bowtle, the co-author of the first edition with Kevin McGuinness, is joined for the second edition by David Osbourne and Charles Buss. All are, or have been, practitioners with extensive experience in the field. They preferred not to call this work The Law and Practice of Ship Mortgages. Nevertheless, there is a practical air running through the book and clearly it has practitioners primarily in mind. For instance, the discussion of arrest of a ship, detailed in Chapter 14, refers to the relevant forms and the Admiralty Marshal’s subsequent actions to affect the arrest, from telephone calls and urgent emails to the boarding of the ship, and captures the time sensitivity of the process.

Yet here is detailed scrutiny of the law as well. No more so than where the law is uncertain. For instance, conflicts of law issues are seldom straightforward and the recent litigation in both The WD Fairway 1 and Blue Sky 2 has confused the law governing the proprietary aspects of a registered ship mortgage. The treatment of these issues in Chapter 4 is detailed and authoritative. Whilst the reader might wonder why they are taken back to the old nineteenth-century cases and early twentieth-century cases on foreign