Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE TRANSPORT OF GOODS IN EUROPE: PATTERNS AND PROBLEMS OF UNIFORM LAW
Dr Malcolm Clarke*
“Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for the citizen of your own country.”1
This article concerns the international Conventions governing the carriage of goods in Europe, some of which also govern carriage elsewhere. The theme is that, the less disparate the regimes and the less divergent their interpretation, the greater their effectiveness and the lower the cost to carriers and cargo interests alike; but that, although there are many more provisions in common, there are considerable obstacles in the way of convergence to uniformity or any new regime that might be a common core for all kinds of carriage.
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I. THE CONVENTIONS
For the carriage of goods the oldest regime is CIM for carriage by rail. A similar but simpler scheme was adopted many years later for carriage by road; the CMR. For carriage by sea the international Conventions are the Hague Rules
* Reader in Commercial Contract Law, University of Cambridge. This article is an updated version of a paper which was presented at Tilburg in 1996 and published in F. Ferrari (ed.) The Unification of Commercial Law (Baden-Baden 1998), 101.
1. Leviticus 24:22.
2. The following is a select bibliography and a list of abbreviations used in the footnotes: Basedow: J. Basedow, Der Transportvertrag (Tubringen, 1987).
Clarke: M. A. Clarke, International Carriage of Goods by Road: CMR, 3rd edn (1997).
De Juglart: De Juglart et al., Traité de Droit Aérien (Paris: Vol. I, 1989; Vol. II, 1992).
Guyon: Guyon, Les Transports Régis par la Loi du 2 Avril 1936 (1959).
IULP: International Uniform Law in Practice: Acts and Proceedings of the 3rd Congress on Private Law, held by UNIDROIT, Rome, 7–10 September 1987 (1988).
Koller: I. Koller, Transportrecht, 3rd edn (Munich, 1995).
Mankabady: S. Mankabady (ed.), The Hamburg Rules on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (Leyden, 1978).
Miller: G. Miller, Liability in International Air Transport (1977).
Putzeys, Contrat. J. Putzeys, Le Contrat de Transport Routiers de Marchandises (Brussels, 1981).
Putzeys, Droit: J. Putzeys, Droit des Transports et Droit Maritime (Brussels, 1993).
Rodière: R. Rodière, Droit des Transports, 2nd edn (Paris, 1977).
Scrutton: Scrutton on Charterparties and Bills of Lading, 20th edn (London, 1996).
Shawcross & Beaumont: Shawcross & Beaumont’s Air Law, 4th edn (London, 1995), vol. 1.
Tetley: W. Tetley, Marine Cargo Claims, 3rd edn (Montreal, 1988).
Thume: Thume, Kommentar zur CMR (Heidelberg, 1995).
UNCITRAL 25: Uniform Commercial Law in the Twenty-First Century: Proceedings on the Congress of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, New York, 18–22 May 1992 (New York, 1995).
Wilson: Wilson, Carriage of Goods by Sea, 2nd edn (1993).
Yates: D. Yates (Gen. ed.), Contracts for the Carriage of Goods (London, 1996).
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