What do we mean when we call ourselves maritime lawyers? Is there something special about maritime law that sets it apart from other types of legal principles and activity? Does maritime law derive from different sources and operate in accordance with different principles from other kinds of law? Or is it simply the application of general principles of terrestrial law—the law which applies to transactions on land—to the particular practical problems which arise at sea and on ships? Is maritime law a subject in a class of its own, or is it simply a specialized application of the general principles of English law—contract, tort, equity and so on?

There is, of course, a simple answer which can be given to the question “What is a maritime lawyer?” It is this: that maritime lawyers are those who practise the law as it applies to ships and the sea, and that maritime law is no more than the body of law which maritime lawyers use in practice. This is no doubt true, and will serve as an adequate, if uninformative, explanation for those who are curious to know what maritime lawyers do with their time. As a definition it is quite wide enough to encompass the hugely diverse nature of the rules which maritime lawyers as a body have to apply in practice. It is only a definition as vague and tautologous as this which will, for example, bring within the same category topics as diverse as salvage, charterparties, tonnage limitation, collision, towage, pilotage, the measurement and registration of ships, environmental protection at sea, the regulation of ports and harbours, the employment of ship’s crews, the regulation of liner conferences and so on. The definition is even wide enough, or at any rate should be, to include those parts of the law of sale of goods which deal with sales of goods at sea, the