Krever, Rick; Kontelj, Srechko; Swan, Allan --- "Reviews" [1997] LawIJV 40; (1997) 71(2) The Law Institute Journal 25

• Book Reviews
• The Joke's on Lawyers
• Banking Law and the Financial System in Australia
• International Trade Law
• Trusts in Victoria

Book Reviews

The Joke's on Lawyers

Jokes about lawyers are as old as the legal profession. Stan Ross sees the fact that lawyers are the brunt of so many disparaging gibes as a reflection of lawyers' poor public image. My admittedly biased sampling suggests just the contrary: through friends and colleagues, all lawyers, I'd run across a healthy percentage of the jokes in this book previously. There are now Websites dedicated to jokes about lawyers and it's rare that a day passes without some colleague sending me another joke by e-mail. The fact is, I can't think of another profession that can laugh at itself the way lawyers do. I suspect many of the jokes in this book are evidence that no one makes fun of lawyers as well as another lawyer.

The jokes are interspersed with commentary and analysis about the humour. Jokes about lawyers fall into three broad categories. The most common seem to be jokes about lawyers' perceived faults - their avarice and ability to obfuscate with jargon.

Typical is the joke (which appears in two variations in this volume) about the lawyer who ends up at the Pearly Gates and complains he'd died before his time, at 35. After some checking St Peter reports that can't be the case as his staff have checked the hours billed by the lawyer and calculated he was at least 110. The many variations of lawyers' light bulb jokes, of which there are several in this volume, also fall into this camp.

A second category of lawyers' jokes ridicules their abilities. There are three sub-groups in this category. The first comprises actual jokes, presented as such. The second comprises a type of urban myth, the story passed around as reliable hearsay - "I heard through a colleague that this happened in court last week". By the time you've heard the story a third time, involving another set of parties in another jurisdiction, you realise it's merely an urban myth, but if the story's good, who cares whether it actually happened, like the story of a defence counsel cross-examining a coroner:

BARRISTER: Sir, do I understand you that before you signed the death certificate you didn't take the man's pulse?

CORONER: That's right, Counsel. BARRISTER: Did you listen for a heart beat? CORONER: No, Counsel.

BARRISTER: Did you verify whether or not he was breathing?

CORONER: No.

BARRISTER: So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, had you? CORONER (with a sigh): Well, let me put it this way. The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk, but for all I know he could be out there practising law somewhere in Melbourne.

The third type of "joke" making fun of lawyers' abilities isn't literally a joke, but rather actual extracts from transcripts showing lawyers in court with a weak nexus between their minds and their mouths. Lawyers take great delight in reviewing colleagues making fools of themselves in front of the bench and the richest sources of these stories are solicitors' and barristers' journals.

A final category of lawyers' jokes is actually about lawyers' clients. The genre is well illustrated by the classic story (repeated in a variation in this volume) of the successful barrister faxing a client (times change - when I first heard the story the barrister had cabled the client), "Justice has triumphed", and the client promptly faxing back, "Appeal at once!"

My guess is this book will do well, with most copies bought for or by lawyers. Which is simply a reassertion of my original thesis that, far from being a negative reflection on the profession, the preponderance of jokes about lawyers is an indication of their very healthy ability to laugh at themselves.

RICK KREVER

Stan Ross, The Joke's on . Lawyers, 1996, The Federation Press, paperback $19.95.

Banking Law and the Financial System in Australia

The first edition of this book was published by Weerasooria and Coops in 1976. The author, Professor "Wicky" Weerasooria of Monash University, is to be congratulated for his keenness in keeping the book up to date, as this 4th edition follows only three years after the 3rd edition.

This book differs from the publisher's other banking law book by Professor Tyree, in that it includes both legal and non-legal materials. It reflects the quotation of Robert Joss, CEO of Westpac, that banking is "a conglomerate of financial services" by covering both banking law and the financial system.

For example, Part 1 includes economic material and useful current statistics on the financial system, analysis of bank de-regulation, and reasons for "banking debacles" in the late 1980s which would be of interest to a non-legal reader. Statistics are included on how Australia is "overbanked", with this country having the highest number of bank branches per capita.

The presentation in Part 6 of some criminal law aspects of banking - including reference to his research on "being robbed (not by) but at the bank" - is interesting, and to finish, the author has included quotable quotes on bankers and banking.

This book focuses on Australian material, and contains mostly English, New Zealand and a few Sri Lankan cases as comparative backup. As I've mentioned in other book reviews, with the internationalisation of goods and services, Australian legal writers looking for comparative materials should also refer to jurisdictions like the US, Canada and our South-east Asian neighbours.

This book is a good effort, and the author is to be commended for seeing his textbook not as a "once off', but as the next in an on-going cycle of new editions. I hope he is at work now on the next edition to update the rapidly changing environment of banking, the Wallis Committee report in 1997, the 1996 Consumer Credit Code and new case law developments, especially in the trade practices area. Are there lessons from overseas the author can work in?

Note: This is not the author's only book, and readers might be interested in his very interesting and illustrated Links Between Sri Lanka and Australia, published in 1989.

PAUL LATIMER

WS Weerasooria, Banking Law and the Financial System in Australia (4th ed), 1996, Butterworths, paper-back $79.

International Trade Law

As the authors acknowledge in the preface, the law of international trade and investment is an enormous topic. How-ever, Australian businesses are participating more and more in international trade and relying on markets other than the domestic market for their existence. This means that Australian practitioners must be aware of the laws and procedures of international trade.

This wide-ranging book takes the form of a casebook with commentary. It exceeds 1100 pages, with 24 chapters grouped into five parts.

Part 1 deals with the role of law in international trade, the conflict of laws and international institutions.

Part 2 looks at the concept of the contract of sale in international trade, the law pertaining to sea and air transport and international modes of payment.

Part 3 looks at aspects of marketing and licensing, including the law pertaining to distributors, agencies, franchising licensing and technology transfer.

Part 4 would be of particular interest to commercial litigators and covers dispute resolution, including negotiation, mediation, arbitration and litigation.

We have heard and read much about GATT over the past couple of years. Part 5 looks at exactly what GATT is and how it affects business.

The authors should be commended for tackling such a difficult area of law and for the thorough and systematic way in which they have completed their task.

The book will become a standard text for students and practitioners in international trade law and should be essential reading for students and legal practitioners who are or will be providing advisory services to international traders and investors.

SRECHKO KONTELJ

M Pryles, J Waincymer and M Davies, International Trade Law, 1996, LBC Information Services, hardback $175, paperback $125.

Trusts in Victoria

This year is likely to be one of significant changes to trusts. The increasing use of both hybrid and testamentary trusts, the introduction of loss trust provisions and the issue of eligibility for means-tested pensions all mean that close attention will need to be given to developments in this area.

The steadily changing provisions of taxation and other regularly amended laws frequently have an impact on other areas of legal practice which is not always appreciated. In areas such as the law of trusts, the effect of those on-going changes means that textbooks on trusts either quickly date or their authors avoid "volatile" topics such as taxation, meaning that the text-books often need to be read in conjunction with up to date "companions".

One solution to this dilemma is to attend or subscribe to the papers from seminars in this field. One such set of papers for 1996 has been published in bound form by the Sydney-based legal and accounting publishers, LAAMS. Using papers written by solicitors from Corrs Chambers Westgarth, this set covers a range of trust-related topics, including superannuation, family law, capital gains and stamp duty.

Essentially, while in bound form, these papers are just seminar papers, written to accompany a seminar. As is usual for seminar papers, no attempt appears to have been made to turn these papers into "proper" book form. There is no index and the papers, despite coming from solicitors in a single firm, are essentially stand alone. They do not easily lend themselves to use as a reference text or as a companion to reference texts such as Jacobs' Law of Trusts, but rather are more useful as one-off reading to keep up to date with developments.

The papers range from a summary of general trust law (much of which is, unfortunately, of little or no practical relevance to the most commonly encountered trust - the family discretionary trust) to in-depth coverage of more relevant and useful topics. The paper on family law has a helpful coverage of cases which have involved trusts and the capital gains tax paper provides a very useful summary of some the CGT provisions impacting on trusts. Overall the choice of topics covered should be relevant to many legal practitioners.

ALLAN SWAN

Trusts in Victoria (seminar papers by various authors), 1996, LAAMS Publications, paperback $65.