The Role of Arbitration in Shipping Law

摘要

Shipping law reflects the development of commercial practices over centuries. Some of those developments were long in gestation and others very short. The practices develop because the parties participating in a shipping transaction, whether contractual or otherwise, need to know where they stand if an unsought eventuality occurs. There were occasions where those practices were insufficiently clear or where they were flouted by one or more of the parties, leading to a dispute. The resolution of those disputes allowed shipping law to develop. A court determining the dispute would often explain why one party was right and the other party was wrong. In England and Wales, in particular, such decisions would lay the foundations for particulars rules of law applicable to maritime disputes. Over the centuries, those foundations would substitute other foundations or more commonly would be laid upon existing foundations, rather like an archaeological site. The publication of such court decisions allowed the circulation, examination and discussion of these rules of law, for the benefit of all participants in the shipping industry and their legal advisers. These rules have since the 19th century been stated and explained in a number of text-books dealing with charterparties, bills of lading and admiralty law, which books take on a life of their own and represent to many the law itself.1