Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
NYPE 2015: Wholesale reform or an invitation to cherry-pick?
Paul Todd*
The New York Produce Exchange (NYPE) form is said to be the most widely used dry-cargo time charterparty form in the world. Twenty-two years after its last revision, in 2015 it was extensively revised. Such is the bizarre nature of the industry, however, that the form in current widespread use is not its immediate predecessor, a form well suited to the needs of modern commerce, but NYPE 1946, which is not (except by being heavily amended). So the new form is really intended to replace not a two-, but a seven-decade old form; it is only natural to speculate whether it will succeed, when both 1981 and 1993 revisions largely failed. But, even if NYPE 2015 fails in its entirety, there are interesting new clauses which might be used, even if the form as a whole is not. The new form in practice therefore presents alternatives: wholesale reform or an invitation to cherry-pick.
The New York Produce Exchange charter is, according to its explanatory notes, “the most widely used standard time charter party in the dry cargo sector of the industry”.1 Obviously, then, a major redraft is a landmark event, but it is dispiriting to reflect that the three years’ work may go largely unappreciated. In recent years, there have been two other significant NYPE revisions, in 1981 and 1993,2 but the explanatory notes to the 2015 revision go on to state that “[the] 1946 edition is arguably still the most commonly used version of the NYPE charter, although many of its twenty-eight clauses are commonly amended or replaced with numerous rider clauses”.3 Neither of the later revisions has proved attractive to the industry, which prefers to soldier on with a 70-year-old form, riddled with patchwork amendments.
* Professor of Commercial and Maritime Law, University of Southampton.
The following well known abbreviations are used:
BIMCO: Baltic and International Maritime Council;
NYPE: New York Produce Exchange.
1. Both the NYPE 2015 form and the accompanying NYPE 2015 Explanatory Notes can be found linked from BIMCO’s site: www.bimco.org/Chartering/Clauses_and_Documents/Documents/Time_Charter_Parties/NYPE_2015.aspx.
2. NYPE 1993 is also linked from BIMCOs site: www.bimco.org/en/Chartering/Clauses_and_Documents/Documents/Time_Charter_Parties/NYPE93.aspx. NYPE 1981 (also referred to as Asbatime) can be found at www.fleetle.com/a/d/pdf/asbatime_nype_81.pdf, and NYPE 1946 at www.fleetle.com/a/d/pdf/nype_46_portrait.pdf.
3. NYPE 2015 Explanatory Notes, 3.
NYPE 2015: Wholesale reform or an invitation to cherry-pick?
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