The Foundations of European Community Law is the sort of book one would expect Trevor Hartley to write, and the Oxford University Press to publish. It is subtitled An Introduction to the Constitutional and Administrative Law of the European Community, but in truth it is in the nature of a definitive text. It explores the essential themes: the Community institutions and legal system; the reception of Community law in the Member States; the judicial review of Community acts by the Court of Justice; and the contractual and non-contractual liability of the Community. The entire work amounts to all but five hundred and fifty pages of systematic exposition, not only of the provisions of the EEC Treaty, but also of the ECSC and Euratom Treaties. The recital of case-law is extensive, yet does not burden the text. The end result is a major work of reference for anybody who wishes to acquire a detailed appreciation of what has been so aptly described as Community Law: the General Part. Part I of the book is entitled 'Community Institutions', and contains an introduction (as do all the parts) and two Chapters-Chapter i, on 'The Political Institutions', and Chapter 2, on 'The European Court' (sixty-three pages in all). In the 'Introduction', Hartley describes the 'hybrid' nature of the Community (i.e. the ECSC, Euratom and EEC), which possesses some of the attributes of an 'ordinary international organisation', and, less prominently, but nevertheless quite distinctly, some features of a federation. The most important characteristic of a typical international organization, it is argued, is that it is but a form of institutionalized intergovernmental co-operation, being based on the principle that no Member State may be bound without its consent. Furthermore, if 'the decisions of the organisation are taken by majority vote, they are no more than mere declarations; if on the other hand, they are to have any real bite, they must be approved by each Member State'. Ironically, of course, as Hartley explains in Chapter I, in the section on the Council of Ministers, the 'constitutional convention' of the veto robs the Community in practice of the facility of majority voting. Even after what your reviewer would describe as the 'refinement' of the convention which resulted from the Council Decision of 18 May 1982, on agricultural prices, this still seems essentially to be the case. Is it possible that one is sometimes tempted to over-stress the legal (as opposed to economic and political) distinctions between the Community and other international organizations? Decisions of both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the United Nations are after all capable of having legal consequences (see