Description

About the Event

The Hague Rules are the first international Rules regulating the legal relationship between shippers and carriers. At the time of their signing in 1924, they addressed multiple challenges which had already been foreshadowed in the USA (the Harter Act) and in domestic legislation in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Over just over a century of development, courts across the common-law and civil-law worlds have interpreted the Rules comprehensively, though not always uniformly. Notwithstanding two Protocols – the first, at Visby, in 1968 (the Hague-Visby Rules) and the second, in 1979 (the SDR Protocol) – and two attempts at completely new Conventions, the Hamburg Rules 1978 (in force in 1992) and the Rotterdam Rules 2008 (not yet in force), the Hague Rules and its two Protocols continue to dominate international carriage.

This lecture considers which provisions in the Rules can be considered as settled by the courts. What is it about the Rules and their provisions that continues to make them enduringly applicable? It also considers the problems with the Rules. How have the courts dealt with these? And how will the Rules accommodate new technological developments that are all the rage?

(A caveat. The lecture does not deal with the Rotterdam Rules, which were the subject of the first Singapore Shipping Law Forum in 2017, ‘Bringing Carriage of Goods into the Twenty-first Century’.)

About the Keynote Speaker

Stephen Girvin is a tenured full Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, MPA Professor of Maritime Law, and Director of the Centre for Maritime Law (CML). He is the author of Carriage of Goods by Sea 3rd edn (Oxford, 2022) (4th edn due in 2027), a co-editor (with Professor Vibe Ulfbeck) of Maritime Organisation, Management and Liability: A Legal Analysis of New Challenges in the Maritime Industry (Hart Publishing 2021/2022), a co-author of Carver on Charterparties 3nd edn (Sweet & Maxwell 2024) and co-editor of Carbon-Free Shipping and Shipping Carbon: Contracts in Context (Hart Publishing 2024/2026).

Stephen is also the general editor of the Elgar Encyclopedia of Maritime and Oceans Law (6 vols), to be published in 2026/2027.Stephen is the Singapore correspondent for Lloyd’s Maritime & Commercial Law Quarterly and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Maritime Law (Lawtext). He is a member of the international scientific committee of a new book series, Studi di Diritto della Navigazione e dei Trasporti, published by Giappichelli (Italy). He was a contributing member of the editorial committee of the International Maritime and Commercial Law Yearbook (Informa) 2002-2020.

Stephen speaks regularly at international conferences, in recent years in Beijing, Dalian, Hong Kong, Panama, Rio de Janeiro, Sapporo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, and Tokyo, and in Aberdeen, Bergen, Copenhagen, Dubai, Gothenburg, Greensboro (NC), Hamburg, London, New York, Oslo, Piraeus, Ravenna, Rotterdam, and Stockholm. He is a member of the Singapore Maritime Law Association and the British Maritime Law Association, a Supporting Member of the London Maritime Arbitrators Association, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and an Associate Fellow of the Nautical Institute (AFNI). In 2026, he was elected a non-seagoing member of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners in the City of London.