The Gazette 1981

GAZETTE

APRIL 1981

BOOK REVIEWS

Cases and Materials on the Irish Constitution: by James

O'Reilly and Mary Redmond, the Incorporated Law

Society of Ireland, 1980. lv, 712p. (with Index) £27.50

incl. VAT.

It is less than two years since this reviewer, in search of a

systematic legal commentary on the Constitution had

resort to a series of articles written by Donal Barrington,

now Mr. Justice Barrington, in the

Irish Monthly,

and

published in 1952. As late as last session, the Law

Society's syllabus on constitutional law advised students

to consult Kelly's

Fundamental Rights,

the last edition of

which was in 1967 and has long been out of print.

The enormity of the gap filled in this last year with the

appearance first of Professor John Kelly's

The Irish

Constitution

and now of O'Reilly and Redmond

Cases

and Materials on the Irish Constitution,

is clear. What

better recommendation could publications expect, than,

as has occurred with these books, that they are pressed

into immediate service in every constitutional law course

in the country and can anticipate a lively interest from the

practitioner and the general market as well?

Both books are however expensive and it is unlikely

that, aside from the specialists, other readers will buy

both. The differences between them are therefore import-

ant. The texts offer a choice;

Kelly

(reviewed in the

Gazette

vol. 74 no. 5 June 1980) is an encyclopaedic

annotation of and commentary on the Constitution

through the cases;

O'Reilly and Redmond

consists of a set

of selected materials with added comment which seeks to

give the reader direct access to the primary sources of

constitutional law and practice. In reading

Kelly,

the

serious student would need the law library at hand to con-

sult the references; in

O'Reilly and Redmond

the library is

built in.

The casebook is an American invention adapted to the

emphasis there on students reading primary sources and

making up their own minds rather than reproducing the

comments of someone else on the law. In Ireland even if

the lecture is still the primary vehicle of teaching, this

book will prove an excellent one to teach from and to

learn from. It will have the added value of relieving

pressures on library resources. Students can be asked to

read a judgment in the casebook, thus avoiding the

familiar nightmare of librarians —when fifty or more of

them invade the library in search of the 1965

Irish

Reports.

But there is more to a good casebook — and this

is an excellent one, than convenience. It calls for a deep

understanding of the subject, considerable skills in select-

ing, editing and arranging the sources cited and perhaps

above all, for a linking commentary which is both

economical and unobtrusive yet directs the reader to the

significance of the range of materials reproduced.

The Constitution itself is, as might be expected the

major document reproduced in the book. That takes up

100 pages. Might it have made the book less expensive if

it had been omitted and the user asked to find it in another

source? The answer obviously is yes, if we had a good

edition to

Bunreacht na hEireann.

The Stationery Office

is still selling an edition which does not incorporate any

constitutional amendment in the text but merely records

them on a page slipped into each volume. At 25p it may

be the last book bargain left but it is time for a new edi-

tion and the text reproduced in this book with amend-

ments italicised and deletions footnoted could well act as

a model. Other sources reproduced in the book include

the leading constitutional decisions and relevant pro-

visions from the statutes. There are also extracts from

debates in the Oireachtas, from the Report of the Com-

mittee on the Constitution, and from various other reports

and inquiries down the years. The value of this work be-

comes clear when it is remembered for all practical pur-

poses most of these sources would be otherwise in-

accessible to the majority of readers.

The selection of cases made for this very large book is

so comprehensive than one is hard put to find any major

decision some part of which is not reproduced from the

law reports. As Mr. Justice Walsh points out in an

introduction which is predictably thought provoking, the

texts of the cases are reproduced in sufficient length to

allow serious study of constitutional reasoning. One

quarrel I would have with the authors concerns the

decision to cut up some of the judgments cited and fit

excerpts here and there in the text as it suited their themes.

From the experience of using the book over a couple of

months, I think it would have been a better decision to re-

produce all of the text of a case in one place with

references back to it at other portions of the text. On

coverage my only quibble would be that the chapter on

Art. 29 and International Relations gives too much space

to the extradition controversy and too little to other

matters. It is for example surprising, to put at its mildest,

that the EEC amendment (Art. 29 4(3)) gets no mention.

The significance of this amendment might at least have

drawn a comment when discussing the constitutional pro-

visions which state that the Oireachtas has exclusive

legislative authority in the state, or that the decisions of

the Supreme Court are final for all purposes.

The commentary otherwise is uniformally superb. It is

most clearly written and never overshadows the material

reproduced — a standard pitfall in this type of book. It

achieves the purpose of integrating the enormous range of

materials used while also conveying numerous interesting

suggestions on interpretation and possible reform of the

Constitution.

A word about the publishers. The publishers of books

are usually taken for granted. They should not be in

Ireland. There are several reasons why we have had to

wait so long for books of this quality on our Constitution.

But at least one of the reasons has been the lack of

willingness of commercial publishers to produce, for what

they consider, a hopelessly uneconomic market. That

picture is changing and the activities of the Law Society in

publishing and stimulating young lawyers to write, has

largely brought about that change. The preparedness of a

professional body to support and to publish a book of this

kind, which must largely find its market among law

students is as unusual as it is welcome.

Kevin Boyle

Law at Work Series: Sweet and Maxwell, 1980. £1.95p

(sterling)

The paucity of Irish literature for those interested in

Employment law in this country has forced most prac-

titioners to purchase English books. These are, as may be

expected, heavily laden with analysis and comment on

English statutes. While our own statutes tend to mirror