The Gazette 1967/71

contractor may be inadequate and the contractor may have to obtain further resources at short notice and heavy expense, while if a quantity is greatly reduced the payment received by the con tractor may make uneconomic the use of the plant and personnel engaged for the contract. For example, where part of the works is the im portation of stone and there is a limited amount of stone available for purchase in the neighbour hood of the works, how can the contractor fix his price per ton for importation if the employer (despite a long period of site investigation) can not tell him whether or not the quantity of stone to be imported will exceed the quantity available in the neighbourhood? How very foolish of contractors and engineers to consider this a practical problem, when it can be solved simply by sprinkling the bill with 'provisional' items. How doubly foolish to wish to hurry lawyers who have so much to offer, making it necessary for the learned editor to admonish them firmly: ". . . even with punctilious, attention and immediate availability of all concerned, pleadings in a complicated building or engin eering matter can rarely take less than twelve to eighteen months, and frequently more than that." That the contractor may become bankrupt in this period or the truth on which an employer may rely to resist a false claim fade from mind is no doubt immaterial—all problems can be solved by words and the arguments of advocates. The text of the book remains an invaluable aid to the discerning practitioner who can separate th wheat from the chaff. Any practitioner asked to draft a construction contract should read Chapter 15 especially, so as to be warned of the traps which the House of Lords has recently laid for the unwary. MAX W. ABRAHAMSON. Bankruptcy Law and Practice by G. H. L. Fridman, I. Hicks and E. C. Johnson, 8v., London, Butterworth, 1970. £5.50. In the preface to this work the authors state

that their chief aim is to provide a comprehensive straightforward account of the law and practice of bankruptcy. They have certainly succeeded. The authors of course write for the English practitioner and their book states the law in that country as it was on December 1st 1969. Bank ruptcy law there, as here, is the creature of statute and in England the effective bankruptcy statute is the 1914 Act which has no application in either jurisdiction in Ireland. The book is based on this Act. For the Irish bankruptcy practitioner who reads the work with care and remembers the distinction between the methods of Bankruptcy administra tion in Ireland and England the book will be in valuable. There is a vast mass of bankruptcy law which is common to both countries and it is to be found set out in this treatise in a cogent and readable fashion. The authors in departing from the traditional method of presentation of Bank ruptcy law used by the learned authors of Williams on Bankruptcy—the standard work— and dealing with bankruptcy law in a logical form rather than the method used in Williams of dealing with each section of the 1914 Act have performed a useful service to the serious student of this branch of the law. They have also referred in detail to the findings of the Blagden Committee which reported in 1957. This was a Committee set up to enquire into the law and administration of bankruptcy in England and while its conclusions have not so far been given legislative effect in that country the findings of the Committee have been studied with much interest by bankruptcy lawyers in Ireland. There are few facets of bankruptcy law which the Irish lawyer will not find dealt with by the authors in a capable and thorough manner. Deal ing with the auxiliary jurisdiction in bankruptcy the Authors at page 304 state than an order of an English Court with bankruptcy jurisdiction is enforceable in Scotland and Northern Ireland in Courts having bankruptcy jurisdiction there as if made in such Courts. There is also, they state, reciprocity with Orders of Courts of bankruptcy in Scotland and Northern Ireland. While this is of course true we trust that in future editions of the work the Authors will note that the practice 218