Brief Biodata

Dr Stephen Girvin has been tenured Professor of Law at NUS since October 2008 and MPA Professor of Maritime Law from 1 August 2015. He was Vice Dean (Research and International Programmes) 2010-2011 and Vice Dean (Research) 2012-2014. He was appointed as the first Director of the Centre for Maritime Law (CML) from 1 January 2015.


Stephen has held faculty positions at the University of Aberdeen, the University of Nottingham, NUS, and the University of Birmingham, where he held a Chair in Maritime Law from 2006-2008. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town, at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland, at the University of Sydney (Parsons Fellow), at Direito Getulio Vargas de São Paolo and, most recently, at the Zhejiang University Guanghua School of Law in Hangzhou. With effect from 2015 he has been a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), Queen Mary University of London. Stephen is also a Guest Professor of the International Shipping Law School, East China University of Political Science and Law.


Stephen's primary expertise is in the field of commercial maritime (shipping) law, although his interests also extend within the broader fields of international commercial law and company law and partnership law. He also retains a residual interest in legal history, particularly colonial legal history, the focus of his graduate work.


In the commercial maritime field, Stephen is a contributing editor with a team of authors from 7 King's Bench Walk writing Carver on Charterparties (Thomson Reuters/ Sweet & Maxwell), published in 2017, and a contributing editor to the 14th edition of Marsden and Gault on Collisions at Sea (Thomson Reuters/Sweet & Maxwell), published in 2016. He is sole author of Carriage of Goods by Sea 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, 2011), third edition in preparation. He has also contributed book chapters to Tomotaka Fujita (ed), The Rotterdam Rules in the Asia-Pacific Region (Shojihomu, 2014), D Rhidian Thomas (ed), A New Convention for the Carriage of Goods by Sea: The Rotterdam Rules (Lawtext, 2009), and D Rhidian Thomas (ed), Liability Regimes in Contemporary Maritime Law (Informa, 2007).


Stephen is a founding member of the Editorial Committee of the International Maritime and Commercial Law Yearbook, which is published as part of Lloyd's Maritime & Commercial Law Quarterly (Routledge Informa). He is the Singapore Overseas Correspondent for Lloyd's Maritime & Commercial Law Quarterly and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Maritime Law (Lawtext).


In the company law field, Stephen is principal editor and author of Charlesworth's Company Law 18th ed (Thomson Reuters/Sweet & Maxwell, 2010). He was also a contributing author to the 17th edition of this work. Stephen is also a contributing author of Palmer's Company Law Annotated Guide to the Companies Act 2006 (Thomson Reuters/Sweet & Maxwell, 2007) and has been an editor of Palmer's Company Law (Thomson Reuters/Sweet & Maxwell) for nearly two decades.


Stephen speaks regularly at international and regional conferences and colloquia, in recent years in Beijing, Dalian, Hong Kong, Panama, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, and Tokyo, and in Aberdeen, Athens, Bergen, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Oslo, Rotterdam, and Stockholm. He is a member of the Maritime Law Association of Singapore (MLAS) and the British Maritime Law Association (BMLA) and is a Supporting Member of the London Maritime Arbitrators Association (LMAA). He is also an Associate Fellow of the Nautical Institute (AFNI). He acts from time to time as a consultant.