Practitioners often find it hard to comprehend the logic guiding the actions of legislators. To the mind of the maritime lawyer must spring a ready example of an apparent mystery. In 1971 Parliament enacted the Carriage of Goods By Sea Act — a short measure effecting a limited number of overdue amendments to the Hague Rules on bills of lading — amendments welcomed by all sections of the British shipping industry. Three years later this Act is still not in force, and there is no immediate prospect of its being brought into force. Why?

To answer this question it is necessary to review the course of several recent developments.

The 1924 Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules relating to Bills of Lading may be aged by contemporary standards, but it has been ratified by more than 60 states and imitated in many others. The Hague Rules (as the Convention is generally known) have thus been almost uniquely successful among instruments in the private international law field in their promotion of the ideal of uniformity. The fundamental conditions for the carriage of goods by sea under a bill of lading are known and respected the world over.

The very age of the Rules has served to buttress this uniformity. Whilst any international rules born in an atmosphere of compromise diplomacy may be expected to conceal ambiguities, there has been ample time for judicial interpretation to resolve most of the problems posed by the text of the 1924 Convention. It is, in consequence, broadly fair to say that the meaning of the Rules is certain — and this is of enormous importance to the speedy conduct of commerce and settlement of claims.

However, to stress the unity and success the Rules have enjoyed is not, of course, to agree with Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The passage of 50 years does witness changes which must undermine some of the assumptions upon which the 1924 text was based. What vision would the word “container” have conjured up in a 1920’s mind? Whoever today would prescribe a limit of liability for an international convention in pounds sterling?

It was the increasing absurdity of a limit of liability expressed as “£100 sterling per package or unit or the equivalent of that sum in other currency” which led to the adoption by a number of carrier and cargo interests in the United Kingdom of the 1950 Gold Clause Agreement sponsored by the British Maritime Law Association. In return for agreement that, where possible, claims should be resolved by recourse to U.K. rather than foreign jurisdiction, carriers voluntarily undertook to raise the limit of liability to £200 sterling lawful money of the United Kingdom. (The Agreement also provided for the extension of the one-year time limit for claims to two years, subject to certain conditions.)