difference between 'common law', and French law, is surely not the point: the interpretation and application of these clauses is not to be filtered through the individual, idiosyncratic mesh of national law rules on substantive contracts. Article 23 tells us just to read the words of the agreement, assuming them to be in proper form, and to leave it at that. Yes, I would. This is admittedly not the view I once had, but reading the material generated by the Court, I think it is right; and when you look at the alternative, I think it makes sense. I also think that there is no need to look on the written agreement to accept or to forgo jurisdiction as a contractual, as distinct from a formal, act; and to assess it is contractual terms is to distort it. For this reason, I think that the Hague Convention goes off in a silly direction, at least if its mechanisms are to displace those currently found in Art 23; and it follows that the lame projection of its ideas into the draft amendments to Brussels I is a giant step backwards, a real disaster. The more one says that jurisdiction depends on finding there to be a valid contract (all the more so where this contract is to be assessed by using rules of the conflict of laws of the law of the state in which the designated court sits, for heaven's sake), the odder and more complex the question becomes. What