The second edition of this book was the last chance to portray this wonderful subject as a common law discipline coming to terms with its new European components. It is now necessary to describe a European legal structure of private international law, if one with a residuum of common law content. If there is a fourth edition, the only certainty is that this residuum will have shrivelled as the project to produce a common European code of private international law moves further in the direction it has set for itself. The core of any course on private international law—civil jurisdiction and judgments, and the entire law of obligations in civil and commercial matters—now exists within a framework devised overseas and legislated in Brussels; the law of ancillary procedure is being quietly but insistently gathered up as well, piece by little piece. If the harmonization of the private international law of property and persons (natural and artifi cial) has been more uneven, it has all still served to change both the superstructure and infrastructure of the subject, so that the road ahead looks very diff erent from what one can see in the rear-view mirror. The techniques used to make sense of this new European material may refl ect concerns which the common law did not have, and may lack some of the instincts which the common law has, but a common lawyer is still happily placed to measure and test it. For whatever one may feel about the new Regulations, which are functional and unelaborated where the common law was elegant but encumbered by history, one takes what one is given and applies the techniques of private international law to it. How could that not be fun?