It is a privilege to be invited to deliver this year’s Donald O’May lecture here at Southampton University’s Institute of Maritime Law, which has done so much not only to promote maritime law as a subject of academic study but also to foster collaboration between scholars and practising maritime lawyers and other shipping specialists and provoke critical enquiry into the state of maritime law internationally. This lecture series began in 1983 but was retitled in 1989 in memory of Donald O’May. For many years senior partner of Ince & Co., Donald O’May, who had himself given the fourth of these annual lectures, was not only a leading shipping lawyer but also a powerful protagonist of efforts to harmonize shipping law, and was a major influence in the work leading to the 1989 Salvage Convention. He would, I am sure, have been extremely happy to witness the contribution which the Institute, under its various directors and currently under the leadership of Professor Nick Gaskell, continues to make to the advancement of maritime law.

Let me come clean from the start and confess to you now what will readily become apparent in the course of my talk. I am not a maritime lawyer, though I have the profoundest admiration for those who are. If I had previously thought that commercial law, national and transnational, was complex, I am comforted to find that it is of stark simplicity when examined against the arcane mysteries of Admiralty law. Indeed, my impression is that the quickest way of grasping the fundamental concepts of Admiralty law is to take a basic, long-established principle of the general law and stand it on its head. For example, maritime liens, which are secret, are almost everywhere given priority over mortgages, which are required to be made public by registration. In the general law a non-possessory lien is displaced by a transfer to a bona fide purchaser for value without notice; by contrast a maritime lien binds the bona fide purchaser. At common law a junior incumbrancer may sell the charged asset without the consent of the senior incumbrancer, the sale taking effect subject to the latter’s interest; in maritime law the consent of the senior incumbrancer is required. The general role of the common law is that security interests rank in order of time; by contrast maritime liens generally rank in reverse chronological order. Again, in the general law the phrases “in rem” and “in personam”

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