Review note

What you get is what you see… Here is a comprehensive collection of EC legislation covering the main areas of Community competence. One has always to be selective in a work of this kind and there is always some risks and subjectivity inherent in the process. Overall, Nigel Foster appears to have been able to come up with a good selection of the most relevant legislation in the core areas of Community action useful for the practitioner, student and (why not?) the academic. There are some important areas (notably, agriculture) which are missing in the collection but the author clearly states his preferences and it would be impossible to represent in a single volume the entire scope of Community legislation. The collection includes the text of the Treaties (EC, EU and Amsterdam) and, among other, relevant secondary legislation on: social policy; free movement of goods; free movement of persons; competition; intellectual property; environmental law; consumer protection; financial services; and insurance sector directives. Still, there are some omissions difficult to understand, such as the absence of the relevant legislation and soft law documents on access to information and transparency or on comitology (which are not included in a section dealing with "Legislation and Agreements Affecting the Institutions"). For the future, it may also be worth considering whether to extend the collection of materials beyond the EC and include some of the actions taken in the context of the other pillars of the European Union (even if not legislation strictu sensu). Finally, having been concluded and printed after the Amsterdam Treaty, which is included in the book, it is a petty that no reference to the new numbering of the Treaties articles is made in either the EC Treaty or the TEU. It makes perfect sense to maintain the text of those Treaties without the changes introduced by the Amsterdam Treaty not yet in force, but a cross-reference system could have been used.

Legislation handbooks have been the usual "medicine" for the legislative "diarrhea" of the modern world. But their place is being threatened by CD-ROMs and web sites. For those who may question why to still produce a legislation handbook in a world of internet and electronic databases the author replies, in the preface, that there are still many difficulties in accessing and working with those databases (even in printing and downloading) and therefore "a portable version of Community law will be an invaluable tool for the practising lawyer who requires a practical and accessible form of the most popular and necessary EC legislation" That he promises and that he delivers, even if the portable nature of a book with 1589 pages can be disputed…