Telecommunications Policy 25 (2001) 161}162

Book review

Telecommunications: the EU lawChristopher Watson and Tom Wheadon and the Communications Practice of Simmons andSimmons (Eds.); Palladian Law Publishing, Bembridge, 1999, 439pp., ISBN 1-902558-15-4

There are at least three types of legal books: law books, books about law and books of law. Lawbooks provide an exegesis of legal rules, useful for practitioners and students who need tounderstand the applicable rules in a given domain. Books about law aim to provide an understand-ing of the conditions under which rules are formed or how they are applied, and their relationshipwith the wider social, political or economic contexts in which they are located. Books of law collecttogether the legal instruments applicable in a particular domain. Telecommunications: The EU Lawis a book of the last sort. It falls to be evaluated against the criteria: does it contain the rightmaterial? Is it easy to navigate? Is it well set out? Is it up to date?

In my judgement the book is too much oriented towards legislative instruments. It contains allthe main directives applying the economic regulation of telecommunications in the EuropeanUnion (EU). Indeed, it adds value by including consolidated versions of key directives showinghow they have been amended over the years. This is extremely valuable to the practitioner or policymaker. The book also includes certain instruments of &soft law' (non-binding instruments intendedto have a normative e!ect). It is odd that the Commission's 1998 Access Notice is included, whichsets out the Commission's interpretation of the obligations of telecommunications operators (TOs)to provide access to other TOs, but not the earlier 1991 guidelines on the application of ECcompetition rules to the telecommunications sector. While it is conventional not to include caselaw in books of legislation, I think this convention is #awed. A book purporting to contain the EUlaw of telecommunications is incomplete if it does not include certain key cases on the applicationof EC Treaty rules on competition and the internal market which underpin not only the properapproach of regulators, competitors and the courts in the member states, but also of the EClegislature, as it makes new legislative rules. Put another way, the person who reads and digests thisbook (and I would not recommend this for the uninitiated) will still not have a full grasp of theapplicable law.

The book is well set out and reasonably easy to navigate. Important aids to navigation includethe glossary and 16 page introduction to the main themes of the legislation, and, in particular, a keyword index which assists in locating key words in the legislative texts that follow. While the keyword index is an extremely useful innovation it su!ers from not including non-legislative instru-ments (such as the Access Notice, noted above). More fundamentally, while I do not believe thatthe computer is close to killing o! the book, I do think that this kind of work is actually morevaluable in electronic form where the text is fully searchable and a key word index could providehot links to the relevant legislation. The authors have corrected typographical errors in the

legislative instruments, but are not immune from such errors themselves. It is rather inexcusable forlawyers to write &principle' when they mean &principal' (p. xvii).

With regard to being up-to-date the authors were bound to have a problem publishing in 1999,at the same time as the Communications Review. They note the likelihood that the legislation willbe consolidated and, subsequently, the Commission has published detailed proposals for sucha consolidation. Again a CD-ROM or better an on-line version of a product such as this wouldallow for faster updating than can be achieved with a book. Within its own purposes and approachthe book is valuable, though its chief interest is likely to be among practising lawyers. Thosewanting law books and books about law will need to look elsewhere. In the latter category, I wouldrecommend the remarkable new book by Pierre Larouche Competition Law and Regulation inEuropean Telecommunications (Hart Publishing, 2000) which is as robust in its argumentationabout EC telecommunications law as it is thorough in its research.

Colin ScottDepartment of Law

London School of Economics and Political ScienceHoughton Street

London WC2A 2AE,UKE-mail address: colin.scott@lse.ac.uk

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162 Book review / Telecommunications Policy 25 (2001) 161}162