Vicarious liability is a subject that has the merit of easy application to quotidian cases, facilitating compensation for many harmed by torts. It has the drawback that we do not agree exactly why we provide that compensation nor when we should stop.

Paula Giliker's addition to the Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law is helpful in three ways. First, it is timely work of solid scholarship. Second, despite the all-encompassing difficulties in terminology, rationale and application, it manages to be accessible, clear and well-structured. Third, it presents comparative and at times historical dimensions to the many facets of vicarious liability, giving the reader a much clearer view than a work on national law alone.

A resurgence in appellate vicarious liability cases has not yielded much greater clarity on their own but works like this provide much-needed detailed analysis. The current period of change was certainly underway by the time Lister v Hesley Hall re-set the test for determining which wrongs of an employee will make the employer vicariously liable in 2001. Thereafter the ‘close connection’ between the employee's tort(s) and his or her employment has been a sign that it is fair and just to hold the employer vicariously liable. As Giliker shows, the ‘close connection’ test may fit better with what lawyers think the law should be doing, but it does not provide any absolute or relative guidance for future decisions. Similarly, while English courts have recently debated the problem of the borrowed employee, Giliker shows that no consistent and logical position has yet been reached.

Vicarious Liability in Tort provides modern and up to date analysis of liability for the acts of others. The best monograph on vicarious liability in English to date has been Patrick Atiyah's 1967 Vicarious Liability in the Law of Torts (Butterworth & Co. Ltd, London), now partially overtaken by 45 years of legal development. Then, other than Thomas Baty's Vicarious Liability (Clarendon Press, Oxford) almost a century ago in 1916, dedicated volumes have been short on the ground and articles have not fully filled the gap. The most recent comparative work has been the Unification of Tort Law: Liability for Damage Caused by Others, edited by Jaap Spier (The Hague, Kluwer) in 2003. This was produced by the European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law as a stepping stone towards formulating their Principles of European Tort Law. It covered some aspects of the theory of vicarious liability and then turned to a set of case examples and how they would be resolved in sixteen jurisdictions. Gilicker's work is slightly narrower in range but still manages to explore English, French and German law, augmented by comparisons with US and Australian jurisdictions, Canada, New Zealand and occasionally Spain. Giliker does not hope to develop a Europe-wide rule of vicarious liability that can be expressed in 86 words. Rather, she seeks to unshackle vicarious liability from the constructs of one legal system. In other words, she endeavours to explore what vicarious liability is, not just what it is or should be in one legal system, be it national or proto-European.

Definitively setting down the nature of a doctrine is difficult and the book excels in places. For instance, the discussion of parental liability in English law is very interesting and the analysis of alternatives to vicarious liability in respect of independent contractors is stimulating. In the same way, Giliker gives a complete outline of liability for harm caused by another by charting the effect of liability for others into contract law, agency and into tortious primary forms of liability like non-delegable duties. Of course, time and publishing constraints then force some selection of the details to be discussed. One of the hardest aspects to cover fully is the relationship between personal liability and liability for another's acts or torts. For instance, the interesting and evolving discussion of accessorial liability for tort is a form of liability linked to the acts of another; bailment is also a particularly regular presence in fraud and theft cases, further confusing the line between personal and vicarious liability even though that line is paramount to the intelligibility of the law. Giliker is in good company in finding it hard to draw a clear line between primary and secondary liability, especially as judicial pronouncements regularly blur that distinction or fudge their decisions in respect of one with dicta on the other. Even the archetypal primary liability alternative to vicarious liability, the non-delegable duty, can present two sides. Giliker first describes them (p 116) as instances of ‘the employer [being] held strictly liable for the torts of another’. On the other hand, over the page she gives the traditional view that they are personal duties of the employer: performance of such a duty can and often is delegated but responsibility for performance of the duty cannot be transferred. In that sense it is not the tort of another that makes the employer liable, but his own failure to take the care required of him personally. Any future projects to give a full account of how the law can and should distinguish between primary and secondary or vicarious liability will be aided by the examples and analysis Giliker brings to bear.

The book deploys legal materials, code provisions, legislation, cases and academic commentary in a smooth and accessible manner. The pairing of originals and translations in the main body of the text is particularly helpful. The work proceeds with a clear structure. The first chapter leads the reader into a gradual introduction of the concepts to be explored and in later pages there are reminders of key faux amis or other complications. Of particular value is the discussion of the control test being first the determinant, but later merely a single indicator, of an employee/employer relationship. This thorough discussion helps to ease readers into considering the full complexities of determining who an employee is and for which purposes he or she is one. In terms of approaching the rest of the book, some readers might choose to cover the first half of Chapter 8 after finishing Chapter 2 and before turning to Chapter 3. Doing so would facilitate the appreciation of theoretical justifications before examining practical examples. All in all, the work does not try to be an exhaustive reference text but gives a clear exposition of the law and its problems. It even makes foreign law seem familiar and manageable to the reader. It is therefore an excellent book for students and for established lawyers coming back to vicarious liability, including lawyers from outside England and Wales.

There can be no doubt that the comparative and at times historical nature of this work is a huge asset. Such works are rare; rarer still are those that use comparative law to show what facts, reasoning and responses are possible more than what is the “best” solution. For example, Vicarious Liability in Tort uses comparative analysis to show how the terminology used can affect the development of the liability described. Take, for instance, the French terms for the parties involved in liability in respect of the acts of another: commettant and préposé. These mean, respectively, “principal” and something like “employee” or “designated person” so they are much broader than the employer/master and employee/servant words which English lawyers use. Giliker demonstrates that the more open terminology contributed to the extension of French liability for the acts of others to situations that English law shies away from, such as liability for the actions of relatives and acquaintances given charge of a particular task. Of particular interest then becomes why those terms were chosen originally and why they have continued in use. Giliker also demonstrates how English law can be understood better by knowing how other legal systems deal with similar problems. This can seem unnecessary to an English lawyer only wanting to know what the law is now. However, such a lawyer must at some time appreciate that learning legal rules does not of itself give you legal meaning. Giliker's comparative analysis is in fact a short-cut to understanding what the law is really doing, a way to look up and see beyond the winding path any one legal system has worked out over the years. More than that, the debates and decisions on vicarious liability detailed show that legal reasoning takes a variety of forms even within one legal system. Just as this variety strengthens the whole of one system, there is no barrier in the English Channel that stops logic travelling, whether in mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, theology or law. Given that this is a work exploring what links one person's liability to another's wrongs, the ability to look past common conceptions of ‘one’ and ‘other’ is crucial to its success.