Book Review by Jo Desha Lucas
Professor Schoenbaum's Admiralty and Maritime Law comes in two editions, one for practitioners and one for students. Since my connection with admiralty and maritime law is as a teacher, my reactions to the book as a teaching/learning vehicle may be more interesting than any views of it as a practitioner's aid. Yet the two are not wholly separable. Schoenbaum recognizes that what the student will want and what the practitioner will want are much the same, and thus the two editions are identical from page one to page 606. The practitioner's edition adds a chapter entitled ‘Admiralty Practice and Procedure’ as well as a variety of forms and specimen documents. Both editions contain a collection of WESTLAW references at the close of most chapters and a seventeen page appendix on the use of WESTLAW. In the ‘WESTLAW Introduction’ that follows the preface, Schoenbaum cautions the reader ‘against placing undue emphasis upon those references as final solutions to all possible issues treated in the text’ and refers the reader to the appendix for ‘concise, step-by-step instruction on how to coordinate WESTLAW research with this book.’ Although may own experience has been woefully ‘low tech,’ I gainsay neither the utility of computerized research nor the quality of the WESTLAW program. I do believe, however, that a hornbook in admiralty law is a curious place for such instruction. From the standpoint of teachers and students, and from the standpoint of practitioners, it is inconceivable that anyone who has invested in the WESTLAW system will not have acquired a manual of some sort that will provide the usage instructions that appear in Appendix B. It doesn't hurt to include this information, of course, but it does run up the cost. It strikes me, for example, that if the author deleted the WESTLAW materials, the student edition could include Chapter 20 from the practitioner's edition without adding a single page.
But to return to the text. Undoubtedly students and teachers will find this book useful. In the preface, Professor Schoenbaum observes that ‘[a]dmiralty is not generally thought of as being either a very lively area of the law or a very extensive one,’ adding that he has found both to be true. So have I. Passing over admiralty law as one of the lively arts, I have found it to be very extensive. In fact, when I reach the general average section of my admiralty course (during the one academic quarter that I am allotted to cover the subject), I sometimes assemble the class and proceed under the Tenth Article of the Rolls of Oleron, mutatis mutandis: ‘Gentlemen, We must throw part of the book overboard.’ While the University of Chicago curriculum committee has never called me to account for this, I depend upon a third of the class to join me in my oath on the holy evangelists that this jactus was necessary to save the course.
For this reason I welcome Schoenbaum's Admiralty and Maritime Law as a valuable resource, and should do so even if its use were confined to informational gap-filling. In the past, Gilmore and Black has served this function admirably, and to some extent still does. A dozen years have added topics, however, and put us all farther behind. I find, for example, that Chapter Two of Schoenbaum (International Maritime Jurisdiction and the Law of the Sea) is a short, well-organized, and well-written synopsis of an area on which I have never stopped. Similarly, while Gilmore and Black touch upon abandoned property, section 15-7 of Admiralty and Maritime Law (in its discussion of the ‘law of finds') addresses an aspect of the law of salvage that is almost wholly the prodct of the last decade—so, too, with the materials on marine pollution.
About the Author
Jo Desha Lucas. Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School. A.B. 1947, Syracuse University; LL.B. 1951, University of Virginia; M.P.A. 1951, Syracuse University; LL.M. 1952, Columbia Law School.
Citation
62 Tul. L. Rev. 1491 (1988)