​Ristau’s International Judicial Assistance

Practitioner guides can be dense, never intended to be read cover to cover other than by an earnest proof reader. While Ristau’s International Judicial Assistance is no exception to the rule, Stewart and Bowker’s review of the interaction of US rules of contractual litigation with those of the rest of the world, and the choice of law consequences, is far more reader-friendly than most.

Of particular interest to those who wrestled with conflicts of law in their university years will be the chapter on private international law and the analysis of choice of law rules. The authors do an exemplary job of breaking down what is a phenomenally complex area of law(s) into a tight 30 or so pages, taking in the European position before focusing, in line with the rest of the book, on the approach taken by the US courts to such questions in contractual cases.

Further chapters on service of process, the obtaining of evidence, legalisation and apostilles, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments give a similarly concise overview of the US approach contextualised against the direction taken in other jurisdictions. It is this compare-and-contrast methodology that will be useful to European and UK practitioners. That, together with the comprehensive index, a tool of fundamental importance to any such wide-ranging text. If it is genuinely to become an aid to practical application, one will want to refer quickly to, for example, the Rome I Regulation in order to establish the implications for the case at hand.

The combination of academic insight and practitioner-aimed constructive advice is balanced, and the text successfully walks the tightrope between maintaining the rigour of a textbook while retaining, without obfuscation, the practical material that working counsel will require. Nevertheless, that readability may be its weakness. A discursive approach and a lack of regularity in chapter contents (when compared to many other practitioner texts) mean that points are rarely neatly packaged. Of course, that is as much (if not more) a result of the complexity of the subject matter than the chosen presentation.

As a result, it is perhaps difficult to see lawyers practising outside the US reaching for this book – however good – as an alternative to speaking to their US counterparts. Still, forearmed is forewarned, and practitioners acting regularly on cross-border litigation with a US slant will undoubtedly find this useful in ensuring they continue to ask the right questions.

Tom Proverbs-Garbett is a consultant