Description

The obligation to nominate a safe port, or direct a vessel only to “safe ports and safe places”, is an express obligation in most time charterparties and some voyage charterparties and may, in certain circumstances, also be implied. In return for placing the vessel at the disposal of charterers, shipowners look to protect their interest in the vessel by imposing restrictions on the ability of the charterer to order the vessel to certain designated berths, ports and places or trading ranges. The principles of law relating to safe ports often take as their starting point the influential dictum of Sellers LJ in The Eastern City ([1958] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 127, 131) but cases in the past decade, such as The Ocean Victory ([2015] 1 Lloyd’s Rep 381), currently on appeal to the UK Supreme Court, The Vine (2011), The Reborn (2009), The Archimidis (2008), and The Livanita (2008), as well as a number of reported LMAA arbitrations, have focused attention on the safe port principle to a surprising degree. This lecture will consider this recent jurisprudence and evaluate how the current law has developed and where difficulties might be expected to be encountered in the future.

About The Speaker

Stephen Girvin has been a tenured Professor of Law at NUS since October 2008 and MPA Professor of Maritime Law since 1 August 2015. He was appointed as the first Director of the Centre for Maritime Law (CML) on 1 January 2015 and, prior to this, was Vice Dean (Research and International Programmes) 2010-2011 and Vice Dean (Research) 2012-2014 at NUS Law. Stephen has also been the Director of the LLM (Maritime Law) and Graduate Diploma in Maritime Law & Arbitration (GDMLA) at NUS Law since 2008. 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 at the Zhejiang University Guanghua School of Law in Hangzhou. With effect from October 2015 he has been appointed a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), Queen Mary, London, where he teaches an annual intensive LLM course on Admiralty Law, and as a Guest Professor of the International Shipping Law School, East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai. Stephen speaks regularly at international and regional conferences and colloquia, in recent years in Beijing, Dalian, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, and Tokyo, and in Aberdeen, Athens, Bergen, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Oslo, Rotterdam, and Stockholm. Stephen’s primary expertise is in the field of commercial maritime (shipping) law. He is the author of Carriage of Goods by Sea 2 nd ed (Oxford, 2011), third edition expected in 2017, and is one of the editors of Marsden and Gault on Collisions at Sea (14th ed), published in March 2016. He is one of the editors of Carver on Charter parties, due to publish later this year, and the author of Temperley on the Merchant Shipping Acts, which is expected in 2017. Since 2002, Stephen has been a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Maritime and Commercial Law Yearbook (published annually as part of Lloyd’s Maritime & Commercial Law Quarterly). He is also the Singapore Overseas Correspondent for Lloyd’s Maritime & Commercial Law Quarterly and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Maritime Law.