This difficulty is expressed by the editors in the introduction and followed by a caveat acknowledging that there may be some omissions where primary materials were not available to them. There also some over simplifications. For example, the only entry under Personal Property in the Solomon Islands chapter states that, The English common law principles of personal property apply in Solomon Islands , which could be taken to mean that customary law has no relevance in that area. Again, it is impossible to cover every aspect of legal systems in a reference work of this kind. There is a great disparity in the referencing of individual chapters.
Some chapters have extensive endnotes, some have only a few, and others have none.
Whilst each chapter has a Research Guide at the end, which lists secondary source materials, the lack of authority for some of the interesting points made in the text, can be frustrating. For example, in the Chapter on Nauru, at p 146, the author states that, Arguments that the constitution may include, by implication, customary law have recently been dismissed by the Supreme Court, which held that customary law has effect only to the extent that it is applied by ordinance or statute . There is no reference to the case name or citation. The endnotes are all placed together, at the end of the book, under chapter headings, which may be considered unhelpful by those who prefer footnotes to appear on the same page as the reference mark. However, whilst both works cover the same region, the work under review is a more academic study, providing a compendium of source information about the systems of government and law in each country covered.