Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
Book review
Rohan Havelock
Faculty of Law, University of Auckland
McGREGOR ON DAMAGES, 20th Edition. Edited by James Edelman, Justice of the High Court of Australia. Sweet & Maxwell, London (2018) clxiv and 1901 pp, plus 83 pp Index. ISBN 978-0-414-06415-7. Hardback £440.
The 20th edition of this authoritative treatise on the law of civil damages brings a change in editorship, following the passing of Harvey McGregor QC in June 2015. Its sole editor is now James Edelman (a Justice of the High Court of Australia; formerly Professor of the Law of Obligations, Oxford). This accords with the wishes of the late Harvey McGregor, who regarded a single editor as necessary to ensure coherence. That said, there remains specialist assistance in two areas: Human Rights (revised by Jason Varuhas, University of Melbourne) and Procedure (revised by Simon Colton QC, One Essex Court).
Those familiar with the work will immediately notice that this edition retains three hallmarks of past editions. First, structurally, the work continues to be divided into principal parts: Compensatory Damages, Non-compensatory Damages, Various General Factors in the Assessment of Damages, Particular Contracts, and Torts, Human Rights and Procedure. Second, the exposition of the law continues the practice of reciting the historic law (sometimes in considerable detail) in order to explain the changes leading to the present law. Third, with two conspicuous exceptions mentioned below, the focus of the text is almost exclusively on United Kingdom case law.
Changes in direction
Beneath these surface features, the new editor has undertaken two significant changes, to be implemented over several editions. The first is a process of “rationalisation with a focus upon principle”, and striking a balance between clarity and provision of a record of history ([xi]). It is foreshadowed (see [1.017]) that the extant historical content will be reduced in future editions. The second is the removal of the inconsistencies between different sections, which have inevitably occurred in a work of this length ([xi]).
Central to the former change are the definition of damages adopted, and the conception of the object of damages taken. It should be noted here that in his review of the 18th edition of this text ((2010) 126 LQR 655, 656), Edelman had criticised the adopted definition of “damages” as unduly restrictive in terms of the form an award of damages takes, and, more fundamentally, as under-inclusive in terms of the type of damages encompassed. The latter problem stemmed from what Edelman called two “dogmata” which were the product of history and tradition: that damages are invariably compensatory for loss, and that damages are concerned only with common law wrongdoing, rather than with infringement of
Book review
429