Good offers, but no deals

In The Times Higher last year, I wrote a piece acknowledging the increase in contract law textbooks aimed at simplicity and user-friendliness and noted that the traditional contract law text tended to be extremely comprehensive yet overly complicated. The two texts reviewed here are further evidence of this shift from the thorough yet complex to the clearer yet less comprehensive.

In many respects, these texts are very similar. Both are updated editions of long-running, well-established books. Both are clearly aimed at simplicity rather than depth. Both use current buzzwords such as "accessible" and "readable" to describe themselves. Both are clearly written for a target readership of first-year undergraduates who find traditional contract law texts too challenging, and both are roughly the same price. Both texts make good on their promises. They are both well written, accessible and reasonably comprehensive.

As is the current trend, both offer online resources aimed at supplementing the text. Here, however, the similarities end. The website supporting Richard Stone's book is clearly an afterthought and, beyond the obligatory multiple-choice questions, it offers little of use. The "updates" section is not is up to date - it was last amended in February 2004.

The website supporting Paul Richards's text, however, is much more helpful. It offers practice exam questions, which are more useful than multiple-choice questions come exam time, but it also gives skeleton answers for these questions. Also available are clear, concise summaries of the chapters in the book. The "updates" section is due to appear in August 2006 and the "links to useful resources" section was due to appear in April 2006, although at the time of writing it had yet to appear. The problem both these books face is that they aim to be "accessible yet comprehensive"

and, to an extent, they achieve this. Unfortunately, in this price bracket there are texts that are much more comprehensive, notably Laurence Koffman and Elizabeth Macdonald's Law of Contract, Ewan McKendrick's excellent Contract Law: Text, Cases and Materials and Jill Poole's Textbook on Contract Law (of which a new edition has just been released).

If these books had cost £15 to £20, I would have strongly recommended their purchase, but at £25 to £30, there are more useful texts available.

Lee Roach is tutor in law, Cardiff University.