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3 WMU J. Maritime Aff. 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/wnujlmti3 and id is 1 raw text is: WMU JOURNAL OF MARITIME AFFAIRS, 2004, VOL. 3, NO.1, 1-2 The Nature and Future of Maritime Law Editorial Maritime law (including admiralty law in those legal systems based upon the English Common Law) is the oldest consistently applied branch of international law. It is a structure built over centuries by the accretion of maritime commercial practice and maritime court decisions, embodied to varying degrees in the codes of ancient empires and mediaeval city-States, then more lately in regional maritime trading agreements. In the mid-1880s the International Law Association's Maritime Committee undertook to codify the whole body of maritime law and this decade- long effort, while unsuccessful, gave birth to the Comite Maritime International in 1896. The object of the CMI has remained unchanged for over a century-to promote the unification of maritime law and commercial practice by all available means. The respective experiences in unifying public and private international maritime law provide an insight into the Comite's raison d'etre. The successful effort to codify the public international law of the sea was accomplished by three major conferences over little more than a half-century and culminated in the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea; by contrast the effort to unify private international maritime law in just one core area, the carriage of goods by sea, has so far required three international diplomatic conferences beginning with adoption of the Hague Rules in 1923, and is ongoing at this writing. Maritime law is highly complex, in major part because it is essentially a complete system of law developed to deal with the almost unique prob- lems of a multi-faceted industry, but also because it must continually evolve in order to comprehend unceasing advances in technology and consequent challenges to and changes in commercial practice. A major impediment to unification is also posed by the manner in which much of maritime law evolves, i.e., by the interpretations of the courts of a growing number of independent States, which often vary and some- times entirely disagree - even in States whose basic system of law is based upon Roman/Civil Law code jurisprudence as opposed to that of English Common Law. The degree to which the body of maritime law is constituted by the precedental decisions of the courts will naturally vary from State to State, but it continues to grow even in Civil Law jurisdictions. For only little over a century have international conventions on maritime law been developed, most notably the series of Brussels Conventions on Maritime Law drafted by the CMI, each dealing with a separate subject, which were produced between 1910 and 1979. As with each of the Brussels Conventions, every exercise of drafting a maritime convention touching upon a commercial subject requires study of the development of the relevant law and usage. Compare this process with the creation of aviation law, which has been 'manufactured' in less than a century to meet the specific needs of another unique transportation industry; this law, however, is very