Construction contracts: law and management. 4th edition

This is a fully revised edition of the UK’s leading textbook on the law governing construction contracts and the management and administration of those contracts. Although the legal principles involved are an aspect of general contract law, the practical and commercial complexities of the construction industry have increasingly made this a specialist area. This new edition has been brought up to date with recent cases and developments in the law as it stands at March 2007. The basic approach of the book has been retained. Rather than provide a commentary on standard-form contracts, our approach is to introduce the general principles that underlie contracts in construction, illustrating them by reference to the most important standard forms currently in use. Some of the common standard-form contracts have been revised since the previous edition, and the text has been revised to take account of these changes. Practitioners (consultants, builders, clients and lawyers) will find this an extremely useful source of reference, providing in-depth explanations for all of the features found in contemporary construction contracts, with reasons. A unique feature of this book is the way that it brings together the relevant principles of law with the practical issues arising in construction cases. It is a key text for construction undergraduates and postgraduates as well as for those taking the RIBA Part III and CIOB Part II examinations.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury: a survey and catalogue of his autopsy case cards from the Wellcome Library, London

During his lifetime, Sir Bernard Spilsbury was referred to as the ‘‘father of forensic medicine.’’ He became a household name as a result of several famous cases. Several articles have been written about his life and work, but an objective assessment has proved difficult because of the lack of available material that Spilsbury himself produced. His main legacy has been a series of case cards, but for many years these were unavailable to the researcher. In 2008, a collection of some 4000 of Spilsbury’s case cards was bought by The Wellcome Library in London and therefore entered the public domain. In this article, we report our study of 650 of these cards. We discuss trends in Spilsbury’s work and several specific cases in more detail. These cards allow an objective view to be taken of Spilsbury’s everyday work, and we feel that some reappraisal of his legacy is now timely