Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - MERCHANT SHIPPING LEGISLATION
MERCHANT SHIPPING LEGISLATION. A.R.M. Fogarty, B.C.L., Ll.M. Lloyd’s of London Press, London (1994). 2 vols. Looseleaf £395.
Anyone who has anything to do with shipping must be aware of the enormous body of regulatory material of one kind or another which affects the industry; every aspect of shipping (be it safety, pollution, registration requirements, crewing or whatever) is subject to legal controls. For shipping lawyers, the task of ascertaining what the law actually is in a particular area, has become one of formidable complexity. The merchant shipping legislation of the United Kingdom is a very large body of law, much of which is now somewhat long in the tooth. Until the very recent consolidation (after this book was published), the principal Act was still the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894. Since then, there have been numerous amending statutes, as well as many completely new measures. In addition, shipping law has become increasingly international, much of it being derived from international Conventions, and (more recently) from EC law. The result is that the basic task of locating the relevant provisions has become complex in the extreme. The practitioner who needs to have access to this body of law in a user-friendly, annotated form may turn to the standard work, Temperley’s Merchant Shipping Acts, but the last edition appeared in 1976, and is therefore too old to be relied upon. The Shipping and Navigation volume of Halsbury’s Statutes is also seriously out of date.
Faced with this situation, Aengus Fogarty has carried out a useful service for maritime lawyers. He has produced, in two looseleaf volumes, the up-to-date text of all the pre-consolidation current merchant shipping legislation. The work is divided into 22 sections, covering such topics as Registration, Limitation of Liability, Collisions, Safety, Carriage of Passengers, and so on. In fact, the collection is more comprehensive than its title may suggest. It includes legislation which affects the operation of ships, even if it is not technically a Merchant Shipping Act, e.g., the Territorial Sea Act 1987. It also includes a limited number of Statutory Instruments; a full collection of these would be prohibitively large, and correspondingly expensive. The increasing importance of EC law does not go unrecognized either. There is a section dealing with European maritime law which includes the four Regulations of 1986 which applied European competition law to the area of merchant shipping. These have proved to be of considerable importance; there have been several important decisions in this area, and a number of substantial fines have been imposed. This section has a useful introductory note outlining the development of EC law in its application to maritime matters.
There are two particularly noteworthy features of Fogarty’s treatment of the material. First, he has set out the texts divided according to subject-matter, rather than setting out each measure in full in chronological order; it is itself, in effect, a form of consolidation. This approach has the advantage of bringing together in one place material which would otherwise be scattered throughout the volumes. Inevitably, it has the corresponding disadvantage that the layout is unfamiliar to anyone used to referring to the statutes in their enacted form; there are, however, full tables of statutes, statutory instruments, and so on. In any event, for the reasons noted below, any such difficulty is unlikely to persist now that the Parliamentary consolidation has completed its course.
The second important feature, and undoubtedly the most useful aspect of the work, is the very
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