Australian Contract Law in the 21st Century. Edited by John Eldridge, and Timothy Pilkington,. [ Alexandria, NSW: The Federation Press, 2021. xxvi + 325 pp. Hardback $160.00. ISBN 978-1-760-02253-2 .]

Australian Contract Law in the 21st Century. Edited by John Eldridge and Timothy Pilkington. [ Alexandria, NSW: The Federation Press, 2021. xxvi + 325 pp. Hardback $160.00. ISBN 978-1-760-02253-2.]

Formal separation of the common law of Australia from the common law of England can be dated with precision to the ultimate abolition of all appeals to the Privy Council from all Australian courts on the simultaneous commencement of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) and the Australia Act 1986 (UK) on 3 March 1986. A little more than nine months later, in Cook v Cook (1986) 162 C.L.R. 376, the High Court of Australia seized the occasion to recant earlier statements of deference to decisions of English courts. English precedents were declared no longer to be presumptively binding on Australian courts. Like the precedents of other common law legal systems, they were to be treated as useful only to the degree of the persuasiveness of their reasoning.

Heralded by that declaration of decisional independence was the flourishing in the late twentieth century of a distinctively Australian common law. The distinctiveness of the Australian law of contract that began to take shape during that period lay less in the fundamentals of contract doctrine than in the inter-relationship of contract doctrine with other areas of law. One of those other areas was increasingly ubiquitous statute law which had come since the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) to govern the formation and conduct of commercial relationships through the imposition of general norms of conduct backed up by a suite of mainly discretionary remedies. Another area of significance comprised the doctrines and remedies of equity, which had retained a vitality and distinctiveness of their own, especially in New South Wales. Another was the emerging common law of restitution, still shaking off the chains of “quasi-contract”. By 1987, in Pavey & Matthews Pty Ltd. v Paul (1987) 162 C.L.R. 221, building on the earlier analysis of Sir Frederick Jordan in Horton v Jones [No 1] (1934) 34 S.R. (N.S.W.) 359, there had emerged a nascent Australian law of restitution for work done under a failed contract. By 1988, in Waltons Stores (Interstate) Ltd. v Maher (1988) 164 C.L.R. 387, building on the earlier analysis of Sir Owen Dixon in