Public international law deals with relationships between nations (Garner, 2014). In contrast, private international law deals with relationships between individuals and nations and the relationships between individuals, as these relationships span the geographical boundaries of different nations (Gutterman, 2017).
Notwithstanding the title Encyclopedia of Private International Law, the editors did not confine the topical coverage of the Encyclopedia to private international law. Public international law, law and economics, comparative law, uniform law and human rights law are all covered. The Encyclopedia provides a broad overview of people and concepts relevant to the field of private international law. The entries section includes articles entitled Absence (discussing when a person disappears and comparing four different legal models for dealing with disappearances), Aldricus (providing a biographical overview of a twelfth century Italian scholar who was the first to study how the law of different jurisdictions affects legal relationships), Antidiscrimination (covering human rights, contractual obligations and the sale of goods among other topics), Jurisdiction, Contracts and Torts, Lease Contracts and Tenancies (providing an overview of leases and related contracts in addition to an overview of the comparative law aspect of lease law), Pasquale Stanislao Mancini (discussing a nineteenth century Italian conflicts lawyer), Names of Individuals (discussing the law of names and providing an overview of relevant case law in the European Court of Justice), Ernst Rabel (discussing a late nineteenth and early twentieth century Austrian lawyer who urged the founding of the first Institute of Comparative Law), Lex Fori (discussing the history of the concept as well as the impact of work by scholars such as Carl Georg von Wächter, Brainerd Currie, and Albert Armin Ehrenzweig), Surrogacy (discussing the regulation of surrogacy in nations that support the practice as well as nations that do not support the practice) and the West Balkan Convention (discussing a meeting of representatives of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia in which a Draft Regional Convention pertaining to civil and commercial matters, property rights, bankruptcy, social security and arbitration was generated).
While subject matter and events entries encompass topics relevant to both ancient and modern times (well into the twenty-first century), biographical entries regarding the prominent people who have made an impact on international law focus on people who lived during the twentieth century and earlier. A more thorough survey of prominent people in international law would have included people who are making an impact in the twenty-first century.
Given the entries entitled Electronic Commerce, Internet Jurisdiction and Internet liability, I expected an entry on the right to be forgotten (a right that encompasses people’s ability to have their personal information removed from the search results of Internet search engines) (Carter, 2016). The closest the Encyclopedia comes to such an entry is an entry entitled Personality Rights which discusses the evolution of personality rights and relevant cases brought before the European Court of Justice. Such an entry on the right to be forgotten would have been useful considering the Encyclopedia’s interdisciplinary nature and that social media networks operate on a global scale.
In keeping with the global theme of the Encyclopedia, the national reports cover prominent nations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America and South America. The reports follow a format which includes sections entitled Sources of Private International Law, History and Development of Private International Law and Administration of Private International Law. Based on the legal developments in the nation, additional sections such as Basic Principles of International Jurisdiction, Basic Principles of Choice of Law and Arbitration may be included in the report. Citations to statutes, case law, treaties and other entries within the Encyclopedia are provided where appropriate, and researchers may consult these works cited to delve deeper into the topics presented.
In the Preface, the editors (Jürgen Basedow, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law and a professor at the University of Hamburg; Giesela Rühl, a professor at the University of Jena; Franco Ferrari, a professor at New York University; and Pedro de Miguel Asensio, a professor at Complutense University of Madrid) note that private international law was primarily European before Second World War, but now includes jurisdictions outside Europe. Moreover, interest in private international law exploded after the end of the Cold War. In gathering content for the Encyclopedia, the editors focused on Europe; however, the Encyclopedia’s scope is global in nature in that approximately 50 per cent of the national reports deal with countries outside Europe and contributing authors are lawyers, law professors and PhD candidates at institutions of higher education in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
The Encyclopedia is user-friendly. As this is a review of the electronic version, a synopsis of the user interface is provided here. The Encyclopedia’s homepage lists all the major sections (List of Authors, List of Entries, List of National Reports, List of Legal Instruments, List of Abbreviations, and Entries A-Z) in a hyperlinked listing that one may scroll through. Each article includes an extensive list of citations to other works for further reading and the citations are hyperlinked to the named work or to citations of the work within Google Scholar. There is the option to download a PDF of the section, view the information formatted as it appears in the print version (by clicking the Original Pages tab) or view the version in HTML (by clicking the Flowing Text tab). From the Encyclopedia’s homepage, one may type keywords or names into the global search box to search for those terms within the Encyclopedia.
Overall, the Encyclopedia is an ideal resource for students, professors or anyone researching private international law and seeking an overview of topics with references to additional sources. Researchers may also be interested in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (Smits, 2012) (RR 2013/254), which provides a history and overview of comparative law as well as detailed analyses of legal systems in nations such as the USA, Scotland, Russia, South Africa and Sweden. In addition, the Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law covers topics such as tort law, statutory interpretation and privacy. The authors of the chapters are lawyers and professors affiliated with institutions of higher education in North America, Asia, Africa and Europe.
