By Christopher R Seppälä with the assistance of Dimitar Kondev. Published by Kluwer Law International BV, May 2023. Pages 1,414. 
ISBN 9789403520605. Price Hardback £239.00

It is hard to think of someone better qualified than Christopher Seppälä to 
have written The FIDIC Red Book Contract: An International Clause-by-Clause Commentary. As anyone who knows him or has read his contributions to these pages will attest, he is a grandmaster of international construction law – 
a field in which he has worked for 50 years. For more than the last 30 years, he has been FIDIC’s Legal/Special Adviser. In addition, he is the ICC’s 
FIDIC Observer, a role in which he is invited by the President of the ICC Court to access materials related to the work of the ICC Court and the Secretariat and provide non-binding comments from a FIDIC perspective.1

It should come as no surprise that The FIDIC Red Book Contract: An International Clause-by-Clause Commentary is first-rate.

The book is divided into five chapters.

The first (introductory) chapter reminds us that: (1) FIDIC forms are drafted not by lawyers but by engineers and in the Red Book those engineers seek to achieve a fair allocation of risk between the Employer and Contractor; but (2) their provision in the Red Book for an impartial Engineer, who performs certain decision-making roles fairly between the Employer and Contractor, is a practice “virtually unknown in civil law countries”, where “the authority of the Employer is … greater”.2

The second chapter is an accomplished exploration of the major differences in construction law between common law and civil law jurisdictions. It notes that “FIDIC’s forms of contract are probably more widely used in civil law countries than common law countries” and seeks to “make up for the shortfall in civil law commentary”.3 This is done by giving “primary attention” to French law as “the most influential law in the civil law world”,4 although many legal systems are considered. One can see how the analysis benefits from the author’s decades of working in Paris on projects governed by many different laws. For anyone interested in comparative construction law, the second chapter is a delight.